The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses 0822962934, 9780822962939

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface: The Holocaust as a Part of Soviet History
1. Introduction: A Reconfigured Terrain
2. Conversing with Ghosts: Jedwabne, Żydokomuna, and Totalitarianism
3. The Soviet Union, the Holocaust, and Auschwitz
4. Patterns of Violence: The Local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July–August 1941
5. "Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population": The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–45
6. People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR
7. An Analysis of Soviet Postwar Investigation and Trial Documents and Their Relevance for Holocaust Studies
8. A Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust in the Soviet West as an Anti-Site of Memory
9. The Holocaust in the East: Participation and Presentation
Notes
Contributors

Citation preview

THE HOLOCAUST IN THE EAST

Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies Jonathan Harris, Editor Kritika Historical Studies

The Holocaust in the East LOCAL PERPETRATORS AND SOVIET RESPONSES

Edited by MICHAEL DAVID-FOX, PETER HOLQUIST, and ALEXANDER M. MARTIN

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2014, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses / edited by Michael DavidFox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin. pages cm. — (Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies) (Kritika Historical Studies) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8229-6293-9 (pbk.) 1. Jews—Persecutions—Soviet Union—History—20th century. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939– 1945)—Soviet Union. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) —Soviet Union—Historiography. 4. Soviet Union—History—German occupation, 1941–1944. 5. Antisemitism—Soviet Union. 6. Soviet Union—Ethnic relations. I. David-Fox, Michael, 1965 editor of compilation. II. Holquist, Peter, editor of compilation. III. Martin, Alexander M., editor of compilation. IV. Gitelman, Zvi Y. The Holocaust in the East: Participation and Presentation. DS134.85.H65 2013 940.53’180947—dc23

2013035242

CONTENTS

Preface

The Holocaust as a Part of Soviet History  vii Michael David-Fox

Chapter 1

Introduction: A Reconfigured Terrain  1 John-Paul Himka

Chapter 2

Conversing with Ghosts: Jedwabne, Żydokomuna, and Totalitarianism 5 Marci Shore

Chapter 3

The Soviet Union, the Holocaust, and Auschwitz  29 Harvey Asher

Chapter 4

Patterns of Violence: The Local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July–August 1941  51 Vladimir Solonari

Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7

“Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population”: The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–45 83 Karel C. Berkhoff People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR  118 Marina Sorokina An Analysis of Soviet Postwar Investigation and Trial Documents and Their Relevance for Holocaust Studies  142 Diana Dumitru v

vi  contents

Chapter 8 Chapter 9

A Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust in the Soviet West as an Anti-Site of Memory  158 Tarik Cyril Amar The Holocaust in the East: Participation and Presentation  185 Zvi Gitelman

Notes 193 Contributors 263

PREFACE The Holocaust as a Part of Soviet History

Michael David-Fox

The study of the Holocaust in the English language was for a number of its formative decades only slightly connected to the field of Russian and Soviet history. During the lifetime of the Soviet Union, Soviet sources on the genocide of the Jews on Soviet territory—the “Holocaust in the East”—were almost completely lacking. It took a while for the “archival revolution” after 1991 to give significant impetus to investigations that included Soviet archival and other sources. But in the last decade it has become increasingly clear just how central the annihilation of 2.5–2,600,000 Soviet Jews on pre-1939 Soviet territory, and an additional 1,500,000–1,600,000 on Soviet territory annexed after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, are for understanding the Holocaust as a whole.1 By extension, the Holocaust in the East is also crucial for comprehension of Nazi fantasies of racial colonization and exploitation in Eastern Europe and the USSR, concrete occupation policies, and the unprecedented Nazi-Soviet war. The “Holocaust by bullets” on Soviet territory has also raised far-reaching questions: inter alia, about the logistics of mass murder and its place within the broader cataclysm of political violence and ideological warfare during World War II.2 Yet the intensive new investigation of the Holocaust in the East is not the only development we should keep in mind when considering the Holocaust as a part of Soviet history. New scholarly agendas have begun to address an even broader disconnect: the entire era of World War II was for decades largely marginalized in the advanced study of Soviet history. The new historiography of the war has for the first time brought a far-reaching engagement with this period fully into the mainstream of Soviet history. This long-standing neglect and rediscovery of the wartime USSR is a phenomenon that holds implications for considering the scholarship on the Holocaust in Soviet territory. In this volume, we bring together revised and updated vii

viii  preface

versions of several articles first published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, the quarterly journal that began publication in January 2000. To these are added previously unpublished chapters by Diana Dumitru and Tarik Cyril Amar, as well as the framing discussions of JohnPaul Himka and Zvi Gitelman. This preface, while acknowledging Kritika’s particular contribution, asks why the subject of World War II is experiencing a renaissance in the English-language scholarship of the Russian and Soviet field, moving it from the margins to a new position of prominence. We will then be in a position to consider how the Holocaust in the East intersects with the new historiography of the war and, more broadly, the Soviet field. From the days of Alexander Dallin and Alexander Werth, who wrote their classic studies of German occupation and the Soviet Union at war in 1957 and 1964, respectively, there has been a significant literature in English on the war.3 At the turn of the millennium, too, Western historians of the USSR wrote important works on the war on the eastern front. But by and large they were military historians and relatively few in number—dramatically fewer than a mere decade later. Why was this the case? The war, while clearly dividing the Soviet period in half, fit only awkwardly into grand narratives of Soviet history. I propose that for many years there reigned what I call an internalist-structuralist consensus in the approach to Soviet history.4 Historians of many different views had in common a tendency to favor the 1920s and 1930s as the formative time when the Soviet system was created. The upheavals of the war thus seemed secondary—a break or an anomaly—in comparison to the more fundamental battles that ended in the Stalinist 1930s. By “consensus” I therefore do not mean a single school or a paradigm; the situation was more diffuse and more deep-seated than that. For example, relative neglect of the war was shared by adherents of the so-called totalitarian school, which emphasized the role of ideology and power, and the so-called revisionist social historians of the 1970s and 1980s, who emphasized social forces from below as key to the formation of the Soviet system. The consensus lay in seeing the structures of the Soviet system—the planned economy, collectivized agriculture, MarxistLeninist ideology as regulated through the party-state—as essentially set in place by the end of the 1930s. Western historiography investigated the revolution of 1917, the years of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the Five-Year Plan, and Stalinism with enormous depth because they had to do with the formation of the Soviet system and the genesis of Stalinism in this structural or institutional sense. Second, and equally important, the formation of the Soviet system and the path to Stalinism was regarded as a largely domestic history; international (in this field, mostly foreign policy) topics, like military

preface  ix

ones, were relegated to a subfield of experts relatively divorced from the big debates. Even cultural history, which came into prominence in the 1990s in the Soviet field, could fit into this consensus in the sense that the formation of the Soviet cultural system could be seen as an interwar story, with the fundamental battles of Soviet culture fought in the 1920s and 1930s. By the same token, it was seen as an internal process: the history of discourse, ideology, and culture were often treated as almost exclusively domestic topics. The wartime experience quickly led in very different directions: it involved the Nazi occupation regimes, the wartime alliance, and large numbers of Soviets in Europe. However momentous, it was a time when the Soviet system was modified, not formed and institutionalized. The second issue of Kritika, published in 2000, contained a kind of manifesto written by Amir Weiner about the deficit of work on World War II by Soviet historians. It was entitled “Saving Private Ivan: From What, Why, and How?” By “Private Ivan” Weiner meant the topic of the war; and he underscored the startling neglect of the wartime experience among Russian and Soviet specialists.5 My notion of an “internalist-structuralist consensus” differs a bit from Weiner’s explanation in 2000, since he strongly implied that the neglect of the war could be blamed on revisionism and social history, which favored socioeconomic processes. From today’s perspective it seems that there was a deeper consensus at root; political and cultural history in the field, if it was implicitly internalist and oriented around the formation of the Soviet system and the emergence of Stalinism, could also be responsible for ignoring the war. Weiner’s salvo came at an opportune moment: in the decade that followed, a new English-language historical literature on the war rapidly emerged. The increased contribution of Soviet historians hardly stems from a single article or even a set of works but from the decline of both internalism and structuralism in the field. The 2000s were the decade of transnational history, where everything that crossed borders and had an international dimension moved toward the center of the historiography.6 The outcome of the revolution in Stalinism was still important but not so dominant that it precluded the impact of later periods, and the Stalin period itself was more frequently seen as being made up of subperiods that in certain respects radically differed from one another. Subsequent publications in Kritika after Weiner’s call to action both reflected these broader developments and contributed to a series of ways in which the war has come to be examined in the field of Soviet history. One of the most significant of these ways of investigating the war might be called “war as a moment of truth”: the invasion initiated not merely a military and

x  preface

mobilizational challenge but a test of the political-ideological system and the loyalties of the population in its various groups.7 A second, equally important way the war has appeared in the pages of Kritika might be called war as watershed, a moment of significant change in policies and practices as a result of the unprecedented emergency and threat to the very existence of the Soviet state.8 A third and even larger category, equally connected to wartime change, might be bundled together under the rubric of war, borderlands, and national identity. The impact of the war on non-Russian national identities, and the relationship of Stalinism to nationalism, are huge topics that have been pursued in the context of an explosion of research on the Soviet Union as a multinational state, on non-Russians in the USSR, on nationalities policy, and on the multiethnic borderlands.9 Furthermore, the war and its aftermath changed Soviet society by exposing large numbers of people to the world beyond Soviet borders. The profound impact of this shock, not least in socio-psychological terms, remains a crucial topic for further investigation.10 Finally, the internationalization of Soviet history has led the field to new lines of inquiry, and this brings me to a last major development in the way the war has been treated in recent literature. This has to do with war as confrontation and contact between Nazism and Stalinism. The interactions between these systems predate the war and emerged out of the relationship between communism and fascism before the Nazi rise to power. But the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Operation Barbarossa, and the occupation of large swaths of Soviet territory magnified the perceptions and entanglements between the regimes and ideologies exponentially in scope and made them into matters of life and death. To consider this most consequential interchange and confrontation between the extremes of Left and Right is to move “beyond totalitarianism” and the classic comparative juxtaposition of totalitarianism scholarship. This has brought the study of the Nazi occupation regimes on Soviet territory into much closer juxtaposition with the work of Soviet historians.11 This last development, of course, is closely connected to the study of the Holocaust in the East. Finally, we are in a position to place the chapters in this book within their broader context and the evolving field of Soviet history. Unlike the other modes of examining the war discussed above, examples of which were published on a case by case basis, the study of the Holocaust on Soviet territory was a topic that was deliberately cultivated by the editors of Kritika. In part, this was a matter of opportunity: the launch of the journal in 2000 roughly coincided with the remarkable and fast-paced investigation of the study of the Holocaust in the East.

preface  xi

As the chapters in this volume suggest, there are a number of areas in which students of Soviet history can make a distinct contribution to understanding aspects of the Holocaust either by using Soviet sources or the perspectives of Soviet studies. We have bundled them into the two major categories represented in the subtitle of this volume: local perpetrators and Soviet responses. The category of Soviet reactions is large and includes Soviet knowledge and understanding of what was happening in former Soviet territory from the highest levels on down; the treatment of the annihilation of the Jews and Nazi crimes in the press, cultural production, and discourse— taking into account the most relevant ideological trends; and a particularly important “negative response” that assumes significance in the chapters to follow, the fraught silences and half-suppressed aftereffects following the cataclysm. It has long been well known that toward the end of the war the Stalinist regime began to deny the particularity of Jewish suffering and then actively concealed acknowledgment of the Nazis’ murderous actions in terms of specifically Jewish victims. But a number of chapters here delve beyond this general understanding to probe a noticeably fuller and more nuanced portrait of Soviet responses. A second area represented in this volume in which historians in the Soviet field can contribute to the study of the Holocaust concerns local perpetrators. Here developments in the Soviet “East” are not unique; Holocaust scholarship writ large has just started to investigate the disquieting issue (and oft-questioned concept) of collaboration with much greater intensity. The last decade has seen far more interrogation of local involvement or participation in the Holocaust in European countries, both East and West.12 Investigation of non-German perpetrators and others involved in the annihilation of the Jews has been given impetus in the study of the Holocaust on former Soviet territory by the oversized impact of Jan Gross’s book on Jedwabne, not just inside Poland but in Western scholarship on the Holocaust in the East, which engaged the questions surrounding local inhabitants more intensively in its wake.13 Inevitably, the investigation of the local level is closely bound up with criticism and evaluation of sources, from the documents generated by various levels of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission for the study of Nazi crimes, which so many historians now use, to the evidence of postwar trials.14 The case of the Romanian Holocaust, of interest in part because it has long been the object of relative scholarly neglect, assumes importance both in terms of Romanian territory reoccupied after Soviet annexation and those broader parts of southern Ukraine held by Romanian troops.15 For as Diana Dumitru and Carter Johnson have shown elsewhere, locals brought up on

xii  preface

two decades of “political-enlightenment work” propagating “friendship of the peoples” acted in demonstrably different ways from Romanians exposed to antisemitic ideology.16 As with any integration of previously separate fields, the considerations here represent the proverbial first step. They suggest only some of the ways in which Soviet history and the history of the Holocaust can be advanced simultaneously. This is natural in the context of a field that has long neglected the entire period of World War II. The decline of the internalist-structuralist consensus is important for the study of the Holocaust in the USSR as well as the war years more broadly. Major cataclysms and upheavals could—and in fact did—significantly affect and alter the Soviet system even if its most fundamental structures remained intact. Moreover, once the academic boundaries surrounding what is considered intrinsically belonging to one field or another are made more flexible—and once boundary crossings in areas previously separated by the construction of fields are actively sought out for the cross-fertilizations they can yield—scholars will cast their interpretive and empirical nets more broadly. This applies to the study of the Nazi occupation regimes in Soviet territory as well as the Holocaust itself. Ultimately, however, the Holocaust is a part of Soviet history for a more fundamental reason. A major part of the most heinous, far-reaching act of sustained killing by Nazi Germany—an act that therefore sheds the most profound light on the development of its racial ideology and murderous practices—was carried out on a Soviet landscape transformed by Stalinism, another of the twentieth century’s most violent and coercively utopian regimes. This occurred as Nazism and Stalinism were locked in a military and ideological war on a scale that virtually defies the imagination. These circumstances in and of themselves should provide the grist for historical investigation and interpretation for many decades to come.

THE HOLOCAUST IN THE EAST

1

Introduction



A Reconfigured Terrain



John-Paul Himka

T

his book opens with an analysis by Marci Shore—nuanced, poking at every tender spot—of Jan Gross’s Neighbors and the debates it unleashed.1 This is precisely where we need to begin, since it was this “one small book,” as Vladimir Solonari calls it later in the volume, that announced the arrival of a new historiographical moment, of which the essays collected here are among the outstanding representatives. Several things have been happening in the new historiography. One of the most striking is that Holocaust studies and East European studies have finally met intellectually. For too long, the annihilation of the Jews of Eastern Europe had been relatively neglected in scholarship or else treated by Holocaust specialists lacking a deep immersion in the local languages, cultural traditions, and historical contexts of the region. Raul Hilberg’s magisterial, indispensable, pathbreaking Destruction of the European Jews made no use of sources or scholarly literature in East European languages and exhibited a superficial acquaintance with East European history, even though, as Timothy Snyder has reminded us, over 4,000,000 of the about 5,400,000 murdered Jews were natives of a restricted area of Eastern Europe that he has dubbed “the bloodlands.”2 Another major milestone in Holocaust historiography, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, followed the destructive work of one German reserve police battalion as it shot and rounded up for the death camps tens of thousands of Jewish people.3 All the actions described in Browning’s book took place in Poland, but Ordinary Men made no use of Polish-language sources or literature and never looked at events from an inside-Poland perspective. By no means do 1

2  john-paul himka

I point this out to criticize these authors’ formidable achievements, only to clarify the historiographical context in which Gross’s Neighbors appeared. Here was a book written by someone whose previous work had concerned the twentieth-century history of Poland but not the Holocaust. Gross was, like all the authors in the present book, an East Europeanist. He knew the languages, the history, the sociological context, and the politics. He came to the Holocaust from East European studies, not to Eastern Europe from Holocaust studies. Neighbors was a breakthrough, almost a paradigm shift. Shore’s contribution here illuminates and contextualizes Gross’s personal evolution to the Holocaust. It is important to recognize that a similar evolution, partially fueled by Gross’s work itself and partially responding to the same impulses as he, affected an entire field—rather two fields, East European studies and Holocaust studies. Neither is the same anymore. The other thing that Neighbors did (and we can see this particularly in Solonari’s chapter) was that it turned attention to local participation in antiJewish violence. Ordinary Men had opened up, as no previous work had, the world of the routine perpetrator: not the Adolf Eichmanns or Franz Stangls, but the undistinguished policemen who executed people and delivered them to execution simply because it was their job to do so. Gross lifted another veil from the Holocaust when he called attention to East Europeans engaging in mass murder and robbery in the summer of 1941, in the immediate aftermath of the German invasion of the USSR. Such incidents had already been known for decades from Jewish survivors’ testimonies and memoirs, but they had not been the object of concentrated scholarly research. Since the publication of Neighbors in 2001, however, many studies on this violence have appeared, taking as a point of departure the events in Jedwabne that Gross had described in his deceptively small book.4 That many questions remain to be answered about this violence is evident from the disagreement one can find even here between Solonari and Diana Dumitru about what kinds of people perpetrated the massacres in the summer of 1941. Both agree, however, that the attacks on Jews in Bessarabia that summer did not arise because of their participation in the Soviet administration. (See also Shore’s discussion of this “anguished motif.”) Another trend set by Neighbors was greater use and appreciation of survivors’ testimony for exploring the history of the Shoah. As Shore demonstrates, Gross (even before his turn to the Holocaust) always had been interested in a “highly personalized source base” and the “experience of ordinary people.” The most important source for Neighbors was the testimony of a single Jewish survivor who left a written description of the murders in Jedwabne. That testimony was one of thousands collected in the immediate aftermath of the

introduction 3

war by the Central Jewish Historical Commission and now housed in the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.5 These sources, and others like them, had been available all along, although they were woefully underused by Holocaust scholars. Gross brought them to prominence, and now they inform much of the historiography on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.6 Neighbors also made use of sensitive investigative and trial records that would not have been available to researchers prior to 1989, but this newly accessible archival base did not play the same role in Gross’s work as it began to play in the new East European Holocaust historiography as a whole. The importance and difficulty of working with the sources that became available after the fall of communism emerge clearly from the essays in this volume. Shore already hits on a crucial issue with regard to Gross’s use of transcripts of security-police interrogations. How much credence can be put into coerced testimony? To find out about the anti-Jewish violence in Bessarabia in the summer of 1941, Solonari makes use of Soviet war crimes trials as well as the documentation produced by the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices. He also explains at the beginning of his chapter the particular difficulties that they pose as sources and how from his experience he evaluates them. Included also in this volume are two important source studies: Dumitru’s triangulation of the war crimes trials with other sources, which vindicates their significance for investigating the Holocaust at the local level, and Marina Sorokina’s study of the origins of and politics behind the Extraordinary State Commission. Sorokina’s piece is perhaps less of a source study than a study of the Soviet response to invasion and the Holocaust; Dumitru’s piece also documents aspects of the Soviet response to the murder of the Jewish population. This response forms a major theme of the present book. Harvey Asher proceeds from Stalin’s lack of interest in rescuing the unfortunates in Auschwitz to tease out the reasons behind the Soviets’ seemingly tepid interest in the fate of the Jews in 1939–45. Although he argues that “visceral antisemitism” played a role, he insists that other factors were also at work. Karel Berkhoff carefully surveys how the Holocaust was covered in the Soviet media and arrives less at a conclusion than at a set of complexities that have to be taken into account.7 Most disturbing is Tarik Cyril Amar’s contribution to this problem. Examining the discourse on the Holocaust in western Ukraine (Lviv) under Soviet rule, he discovers an “imperfect silence,” one that acknowledged that the Holocaust happened but not that it had any outstanding importance: the mass extermination of the Jews was self-evident— common knowledge but marginal.

4  john-paul himka

From Amar’s insight we can understand the fierce resistance that Gross’s work and other studies of local perpetration have encountered in postcommunist Europe. The inhabitants of Jedwabne did not need Gross’s book to find out about the savage events of late June 1941. They knew, but the events had not loomed large in their consciousness, and aside from a desultory trial after the war, no one had raised a stink about them. In the territories acquired by the Soviets in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, older people had witnessed the Holocaust with their own eyes and saw—some even participated in—the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941. But the imperfect silence in Soviet and Polish communist discourse comforted them that although these things had happened, they were not very meaningful and required no reckoning. The view that it was only the “German fascist invaders” who killed not so much Jews as “peaceful Soviet citizens” was a convenience for both the regime and the population. The new historiography, which brings a dark past to light, has painfully challenged this indifference, and a new chapter of working through the Holocaust has opened. The essays collected here have played their part in revising perspectives.

2

Conversing with Ghosts

Jedwabne, Żydokomuna, and Totalitarianism

marci shore

O

n 10 July 1941, just after the withdrawal of the Red Army and the arrival of the Wehrmacht, the Polish townspeople of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbors. From the sidelines those Germans who were present looked on and took photographs. The final massacre was preceded by days of stonings and lynchings of individual Jews. Earlier that day, several dozen of the strongest Jewish men were forced to dismantle the Lenin statue, carry it to the cemetery, and dig a grave for its burial. The bodies of the men were thrown into the same grave. Later that day, local Poles from Jedwabne and nearby villages forced the town’s several hundred to a thousand remaining Jews from their homes and into the town square, herded them into a barn, and set the barn on fire. In this way Jedwabne Jewry came to an end. Six and a half years later, the Central Committee of Polish Jews received a letter from Montevideo, Uruguay. Its author was Całka Migdał, a Jedwabne Jew who had left Poland ten years earlier but whose mother, sister, and other family members had remained there. “We’ve had news,” Midgał wrote, “that they perished not by German but by Polish hands.” In February 1948, the district court in Łomża (a larger town close to Jedwabne) began an investigation on the basis of the so-called August Decree issued by the communistdominated Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), which called for criminal charges against Nazi collaborators. Following a rather lax investigation, there was a two-day trial of twenty-two men, most of whom were born in Jedwabne, none of whom had had a higher education, and three of 5

6  marci shore

whom admitted to illiteracy.1 During interrogations by the Security Office (UB), the accused confessed to varying degrees of involvement, in the course of which they related sundry gruesome anecdotes. At the trial itself, however, all the defendants claimed to have been beaten during interrogation, recanted their testimonies, and pled innocent. Twelve were found guilty, and ten were acquitted.2 In May 2000, Jan Tomasz Gross published, in Polish, a short book titled Sąsiedzi: Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka, telling the story of the Jedwabne massacre. A year later, Princeton University Press brought out the English edition: Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.3 This was, Gross noted, a collective murder in the double sense, with respect to the victims as well as the perpetrators. Everyone who was present in the town that day was either a witness to or a participant in the crime.4 For some six months after Sąsiedzi first appeared in Polish bookstores, a virtual silence reigned.5 Then, in November 2000, the leading Polish newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, published Jacek Żakowski’s interview with Tomasz Szarota.6 About Sąsiedzi Żakowski made the comment, “That book is an atomic bomb with a long fuse.”7 So it was. The Gazeta Wyborcza piece opened a Pandora’s box; and by the spring of 2001, well over 100 texts were appearing each month about Jedwabne.8

Points of Critique In a passage his critics tend to overlook, Gross writes that the undisputed masters over life and death in Jedwabne at this time were the Germans, of how the Germans “were the only ones who could decide the fate of the Jews. . . . Had Jedwabne not been occupied by the Germans, the Jews of Jedwabne could not have been murdered by their neighbors.”9 Yet, he continues, the ones who physically enacted the massacre were local Poles, and Gross surmises that they were not coerced but rather acted “of [their] own free will.”10 Neither the critical presence of the Germans nor the actions of the Poles have been the object of much dispute. Debate, rather, has focused on what could perhaps be described as matters of nuance: Did the Germans force the local Poles to murder the Jews? Or did they order the Poles to commit the massacre but decline to employ physical coercion? Perhaps the Germans merely encouraged the Poles? Suggested that they . . . ? Invited them to . . . ? Approved in advance? Gave their assent? Gross has been attacked most concretely for his alleged dismissal of—and insufficient research into—the role of the Germans. He has been criticized further for his use of two main sources. The first of these is the material from the 1949 Łomża trial, in particular the transcripts of the UB interrogations

conversing with ghosts 7

of the 22 accused men. Gross, while acknowledging that UB interrogators might well have been brutal, argues that the confessions are more persuasive than their retractions given that the Łomża trial was not held for purposes of political propaganda; after all, Poland’s Stalinist regime had no interest in demonstrating that Jews had suffered in a special way during the war, less still at the hands of the Poles. On the contrary, the indictment explicitly lays primary responsibility on the Germans and charges the accused with collaboration. Precisely because the trial was not a political game, Gross argues, the trial records can in fact help us reconstruct the truth. It was social pressure—and fear of retribution by their own neighbors, all of whom had an interest in concealing the town’s participation—that motivated the recantations on the day of the trial.11 Gross’s second important source is testimony by Jewish survivors, in particular one named Szmul Wasersztajn [Shmuel Wasserstein] (who, together with several other Jedwabne Jews, was rescued by a local Polish couple named Wyrzykowski). In a section titled “A New Approach to Sources,” Gross argues that when dealing with Holocaust survivor testimonies, we historians should change our initial assumption from one of a priori skepticism to one of tentative affirmation—until convincing evidence suggests otherwise. The judgment is in part a response to his own previous attitude toward sources, and in particular the years it took him to absorb the implications of Wasersztajn’s account.12 This shift in initial attitude will spare historians from more errors than the reverse assumption, Gross argues, particularly given that all Holocaust testimonies de facto present a positively distorted picture since they are, by definition, stories with “happy endings.” “About the ‘heart of darkness’ that was also the very essence of their experience,” he writes, “about their last betrayal, about the Calvary of 90 percent of the prewar Polish Jewry—we will never know.”13 Gross’s critics also hold against him what they have called his “lack of historical context”—by which they mean the 21 months of Soviet occupation preceding the German army’s arrival in Jedwabne. Here the subtext is the alleged role of Polish Jews in the 1939–41 Soviet occupation, a claim hopelessly entangled in a black hole of mutual bitterness. For this question of Poles, Jews, and communism—and the Polish notion of żydokomuna, a virtually untranslatable term referring to Jewish communism or a Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy—is inseparable from the question of Polish-Jewish relations in the years before and during World War II.14 The Polish national self-image is tightly bound up in the dual Romantic notions of Poland as the heroic fighter Za naszą i waszą wolność (For our freedom and yours) and Poland as the Christ of Nations, an eternal martyr who dies for others. Poles are, therefore,

8  marci shore

often deeply resentful of what they perceive as Jews’ monopolization of the legacy of suffering during World War II. A somewhat perverse competition over martyrdom has long been a trope of Polish-Jewish dialogue. After all, Poles point out, some 3,000,000 non-Jewish Polish citizens died during the war in addition to 3,000,000 Polish Jews.15 Still more resented are suggestions that Polish antisemitism might have played a role in the Nazis’ decision to locate the extermination camps in Poland and speculations that had the Nazis not “resolved the Jewish question,” the Poles might have attempted to do so.16 In response, Poles point to the extraordinary heroism of the Polish antiNazi resistance, Poland’s role as one of the Allies, and the fact that there was never a Polish Quisling. Some Poles add that, on the contrary, by and large, Jews were not victims of Poles in the age of totalitarianism; rather, Poles were victims of Jews—in particular, notorious Stalinist leaders such as Jakub Berman.17 For many Poles, communism in general and Stalinism in particular were Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracies against Poland.18 The radical apologist response to Neighbors, therefore, tends to take the following position: Poles would never have done this; if they (or rather, we) did, then it was because the Jews deserved it (for having collaborated with the Soviet occupier), and as far as the balance of wrongs and the “settling of accounts” is concerned, the Jews owe us. Given that Jews made up half of Jedwabne’s population, Gross takes pains to point out, they must have served various functions in the Soviet administration, but the most important positions were filled by so-called vostochniki (cadres whom the Soviets imported from the east).19 Moreover, the anti-Soviet resistance in the Jedwabne area was in the end betrayed to the Soviets not by Jews (as popular opinion apparently held) but by local Poles.20 He argues that Jewish enthusiasm for the Red Army was not at all widespread, while there is strong evidence that in 1941 local Poles in this area enthusiastically welcomed the Wehrmacht.21

On Totalitarianism It is this, the role of Polish Jews alleged by Gross’s critics in the 1939–41 Soviet occupation of (what had been) eastern Poland, that most directly leads us into the abyss of totalitarianism. Anyone reading Antony Polonsky and Joanna Machlic’s The Neighbors Respond will soon see how the theme of żydokomuna and of the Jews’ role in the Soviet occupation returns again and again in the responses to the Jedwabne story, rendering it all but impossible in the Polish context to disentangle the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian experiences. For the specific matter in dispute (that is, Polish versus German agency and hence ultimate responsibility in the massacre of Jedwabne’s Jews), together with the whole angst-laden topic of Polish-Jewish relations (now largely a question of

conversing with ghosts 9

historical memory), are in a sense only metonyms, beneath which lie all the haunting questions of the twentieth century. Despite the often self-absorbed debate about Polish antisemitism, the Jedwabne story is not only about Poles and Jews but also about modernity and revolution, subjectivity and totalitarianism. A certain narcissism within Poland is complemented and reinforced by the tendency of the rest of the world to ignore Poland’s existence. (The historian Antony Polonsky was once asked in an interview for the PolishJewish magazine Midrasz whether it was true that in the West people thought of Poland as an antisemitic country. In the West, Polonsky answered quite brilliantly, people generally don’t think of Poland at all.)22 During World War II, however, Poland was in fact the center and not the periphery, the site where the dark side of modernity was most dramatically realized. Jedwabne, in turn, can serve as a metonym of Poland’s central position during World War II. The town suffered multiple occupations and was repeatedly passed back and forth between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. Immediately following the Nazi attack on Poland in September 1939, Jedwabne was taken by the Germans. Within a few weeks, however, in accordance with an agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the area became part of the Soviet occupation zone. It was treated as “western Belarus” and incorporated into the Belorussian SSSR. The town remained Soviet territory for the next 21 months, until the 22 June 1941 Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. Jedwabne represents well the situation of the so-called kresy, that part of eastern Poland that fell subject to alternating Nazi and Soviet occupations, in that it reveals the close proximity of totalitarianism and anarchy, exacerbated by a habituation to violence that accompanied both occupations.23 Totalitarian regimes’ refusal to acknowledge that the realm of the possible was circumscribed (as Hannah Arendt observed) exerted a certain mimetic effect, and engagement in ethnic cleansing during the war was not confined to the totalitarian occupiers.24 This was a time and a place, as we learn from Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansing, where throwing babies on pitchforks into fires was no longer unthinkable.25 In the kresy, Nazism and Stalinism confronted each other but also confronted the local population with bewildering and dire choices. With respect to this experience, Gross offers two new hypotheses. The first, inspired by the discovery that the most active perpetrators of the Jedwabne massacre were townspeople who had previously collaborated with the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), is that people compromised by their collaboration with one regime might be easily tempted into collaboration with the next one.26 Referring to Jedwabnian Zygmunt Laudański’s 1949 letter from prison, Gross points to Laudański’s remarkable

10  marci shore

conformism, his attempts to “anticipate what each successive carnivorous regime of this epoch might most desire of its subject, and [go] to extremes in his zeal to please.”27 Gross’s second hypothesis suggests a variegated understanding of the Holocaust. That is, genocide is not only something modern, monolithic, highly organized, and imposed from above but also a mosaic composed of separate episodes (some revealing an absence of both organization and industrial methods in favor of sticks and stones, fire and water); the improvisations of local caciques; and impulsive responses from the surrounding population.28 Gross is a sociologist and historian of totalitarianism, and the context for the microhistory of Neighbors is elaborated in his earlier books. Few historians more deeply appreciate Polish heroism and martyrdom. His first major work, Polish Society under German Occupation, describes how the Polish underground transcended the confines of a military conspiracy to become a parallel polis that fought against social atomization and preserved social values: “What, then, was the message of the underground that permits us to describe its principal role as we have, and that allowed it to grow and strengthen despite German victories, terror, and its own incessant quarrels? Was it the call to fight for independence? I think not. What it publicized instead was the conviction that only by opposing the Nazi conquest could people rescue values, that the very existence of civilization was at stake, that the confrontation was between barbarism and humanity.”29 The study as a whole serves as a testimony to Polish society’s tenacity and cohesion, its refusal to submit to disintegration in the face of Nazi terror. The more immediate context for Neighbors, however, is contained in Gross’s Revolution from Abroad, first published in 1988.30 Here Gross tells a wrenching story of the fate of former Polish citizens in the kresy between September 1939 and June 1941. He writes of how the Red Army encouraged the local population to rise up against the Polish landowners who had oppressed them and take revenge “with whatever was at hand—scythes, axes, or pitchforks.”31 Local Communists were given free rein to exact vengeance on their enemies. Gross cites accounts of Poles shot and buried alive in pits; of noses, ears, and genitals cut off and eyes gouged out.32 Beginning in February 1940, over 300,000 former Polish citizens were deported to labor settlements in Siberia and Kazakhstan; Gross writes of babies crying for milk and deportees dying of thirst in lice-infested freight cars, of children lying near the door and licking the frost from the nails, of the trail of children’s corpses the transports left behind.33 As the Red Army withdrew in the wake of the Nazi attack, Soviet authorities dealt with hundreds of thousands they had taken prisoner by shooting them in the back of the head or, alternatively, herding

conversing with ghosts 11

them onto trains in inhuman conditions, putting them on the road and ordering them to march for days without food or water, or torturing them to death.34 Gross both offers a compelling portrayal of Polish devastation and engages with totalitarian theory, in particular with the Arendtian tradition. The case of the kresy requires a different starting point, given that Stalinism there was not created domestically but rather imported from abroad. Totalitarianism’s “origins,” hence, are not an issue in this book; the focus, rather, is on how the local population negotiated a relationship to something foreign and imposed. Poland as a site of imported totalitarianism suggests also a certain caveat to the long-standing thesis that Nazism and Stalinism were in essence similar phenomena. For the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, Gross points out, related quite differently to the parts of Poland they respectively occupied. Whereas the Nazis arrived bearing “pervasive discriminatory contempt” and “Übermensch airs,” the Soviets arrived with slogans of liberation and “behaved no differently in occupied Poland than they did in their own country.” “They were simply,” Gross writes, “sharing their own ways.”35 Revolution from Abroad provides a context for Neighbors also in its insights about Stalinist rule’s impact on the population, and specifically about the relationship between totalitarian power and individual agency. Gross, like Arendt, emphasizes the striving for total control and atomization, the transparency between public and private realms, and the blurring of the distinction between victim and oppressor.36 In Gross’s reading, the Soviet regime achieved this control in part through a certain lawlessness and arbitrariness.37 Some 22 years after the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin’s Kto kogo (who [does what] to whom) remained in force, and random violence became the rule rather than the exception. The Red Army, for its part, seemed pleased. Contributing to the effacing of the boundaries between public and private and between victim and oppressor were the regime’s promotion of complicity and its attempt to implicate everyone. In short, the leaders of the Stalinist regime “strove to separate their subjects from their own consciences.”38 Among the book’s far-reaching contributions is precisely this thesis about self-subjugation, the “privatization of power.” “The wisdom of the Soviet regime,” Gross writes in Revolution from Abroad, “had been that the population must subdue itself and that with a little encouragement it generally would.”39 Under Soviet rule, each community was induced to undermine its own cohesiveness, to enact its own self-destruction. This is a revision of the classical totalitarian model in which the totalitarian state eclipses the private realm. “Although the distinction between private and public realm is indeed obliterated under totalitarianism,” Gross writes, “this occurs not because of

12  marci shore

the confiscation of the private realm by the state but primarily because of the privatization of the public realm.”40 Here Gross points to the phenomenon of denunciations and the way in which everyone had immediate access to the apparatus of the state and was encouraged to use it against others. “I propose,” he writes, “that the real power of a totalitarian state results from its being at the disposal of every inhabitant, available for hire at a moment’s notice.”41 One could describe this as a kind of dialectic of power: individuals are rendered at once infinitely powerful and infinitely vulnerable. Anyone could become another’s executioner. Revolution from Abroad was inspired by the discovery of a particularly rich source base: the handwritten testimonies (housed in the Hoover Institution Archive) of thousands of Polish citizens who fell under Soviet occupation in September 1939. The historical, narrative nature of Revolution from Abroad, the author’s concern with the experience of “ordinary people,” and in particular the highly personalized source base renders the book more human than other theoretical writings about totalitarianism. One sees here as well how Gross’s interest in individual agency under totalitarianism, how individuals “on the ground” behave under totalitarian rule, long predates Neighbors and transcends Polish-Jewish relations in particular.42

On Dialogue and “Postmodernism” The story of the publication of Sąsiedzi is perhaps better understood by beginning with another slim book that Gross wrote and published in Polish two years earlier: Upiorna dekada: Trzy eseje na temat wzajemnych relacji między Żydami, Polakami, Niemcami i komunistami w latach 1939–1948 (The Ghastly Decade: Three Essays on the Theme of Relations among Jews, Poles, Germans, and Communists in 1939–1948). In his introduction, Antony Polonsky describes what is to follow as an “angry and provocative book, written by someone who is both a Pole and a Jew.”43 Upiorna dekada in fact begins with a self-criticism: In part I bear resentment against myself as the author of two books about the mechanisms of Soviet (1939–1941) and German (1939–1944) occupation in Poland who passed over the question of Jews, regarding it as a subject to be treated separately. This came to me easily, without much doubt or reflection, since such were the rules of the historian’s workshop in relation to this period, and not only in Polish historiography. Today I regard this as an error, for it is not possible to amputate the Holocaust from the inner experience of the German occupation in Poland, or for that matter in any other European country.44

conversing with ghosts 13

The three essays deal with the Nazi occupation, the Soviet occupation, and the immediate postwar years. In the first essay Gross examines how Poles treated Jews during the Holocaust and asks why more Jews were not saved. He begins with a long citation from a 1940 report to the Polish governmentin-exile by Home Army courier Jan Karski. In it Karski wrote: “The resolving of the Jewish question by the Germans—I must state this with a complete feeling of responsibility for what I am saying—is a serious and quite dangerous instrument in German hands for the moral pacification of wide strata of Polish society” (27). Gross then compares the relative costs of participating in the underground resistance versus hiding Jews. He argues that the traditional explanation—that is, that more Poles did not try to hide Jews because the Nazis’ penalty for doing so was so high—is a weak one given the discrepancy between marginal cost differences and vast differences in behavior. Besides, “Poles stood up to dangers with courage and imagination during the war.”45 Moreover, Gross writes, we know—precisely because of the abundant and uncensored underground press—that the majority of the Polish population was not favorably disposed toward Jews. He argues further that the high cost of helping Jews was in part the result of the reluctance of the Polish masses to engage in the endeavor; because the numbers were small, the Germans could apply the death penalty with consistency. Moreover, the danger to a Polish family hiding a Jew generally came from a passerby or neighbor rather than directly from the Gestapo and in this way differed from involvement in the underground: sanctions could be easily enforced because hiding Jews did not meet with social approval. This lack of social approval was so powerful—and this is perhaps Gross’s most disconcerting evidence—that many Poles who hid Jews during the war at great risk to their own lives later asked that their names be removed from postwar histories of Polish rescuers, for fear of their neighbors’ reactions.46 In the second essay Gross engages the question of Polish Jews in the eastern territories under Soviet occupation and addresses the stereotype of żydokomuna. He notes that some Jews (together with Belarusians and Ukrainians) may have collaborated with the Soviets but asks: Why should they have felt loyalty to a Polish state that excluded them? Why should they not have been attracted to promises of an end to ethnic discrimination? The Jews, Gross says, were on the whole ruined economically and socially by the Soviet invasion. He argues further that Jews were hardly privileged under the Soviet occupation but rather were deported to the Soviet interior in disproportionately large numbers.47 Perhaps the most disturbing (and the newest) chapter of Upiorna dekada is the final one, based on material in the archive of the Central Committee

14  marci shore

of Polish Jews, documenting the reception given Jewish survivors who returned to Poland after the war. Here Gross shares with his readers accounts of accusations of ritual murder provoking pogroms; of Jews being attacked randomly on trains; of Poles attacking a Kraków synagogue on Shabbat; of a Polish soldier beating a wounded pogrom victim who had reached the hospital and was awaiting surgery. By the end of 1948, 250,000 Holocaust survivors had fled Poland. The last essay in Upiorna dekada, grappling with the mass postwar emigration of Jewish survivors, concludes with the question: “Was this simply a successive wave of emigration in search of bread? And if not, if it was the flight of a whole nation from persecution, then what does that say about us?”48 In its self-reflective tone, Upiorna dekada departs strikingly from traditional Polish historical writing. As disturbing as the content is, the book flows quickly and smoothly; I read it with a distinct sense of eavesdropping on a very private conversation, a conversation Gross has here with Poles—as a Pole, as a Jew, as an émigré. Prefacing Upiorna dekada is an English epigraph by A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie the Pooh: “Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday.” On the previous page Gross dedicates the book to his children “in the hope that their world will be a bit better if we draw out into the light of day and—in speaking about them without end—perform an exorcism on the ghosts who ruined the lives of our parents’ generation.” Yet few others came forth to join in the exorcism; the book met with relatively little response.49 Sąsiedzi, then, has to be seen as a continuation of an intimate conversation— with Gross’s friends and colleagues, Polish historians and intellectuals. That Gross himself considered this conversation in the first place a private one among Poles is suggested as well by the fact that he deliberately waited for a year before publishing an English version of Sąsiedzi.50 The Polish journalist Jacek Żakowski offers the criticism of Sąsiedzi that “Gross has (judging from his approach to sources) a ‘postmodern’ subjectivizing attitude.” In turn, Gross responds that his attitude toward truth is not “postmodern” but rather Aristotelean.51 I would argue that, in at least one important respect, Sąsiedzi is “postmodern,” and that this is one of the work’s (perhaps unappreciated) formal innovations. In conveying the graphic details—the brothers Wacek’s and Mietek’s playing of the accordion and clarinet to drown out the cries of Jewish women and children; the murderers’ plucking out of the Jew Krawiecki’s eyes and cutting off of his tongue; the children picked up by the legs and hurled into the fire; the burial of the burned corpses—Gross pointedly refrains from using his own words. He rather lets his sources—the voices of Jedwabnians of times past—speak for themselves; in essence, he converses with them. Gross is chilled, for instance,

conversing with ghosts 15

by Szmul Wasersztajn’s use of the diminutive—and as such decidedly familiar and even vaguely affectionate—versions of his Polish neighbors’ names as he describes how they fell upon and murdered his fellow Jews.52 In this way the Polish Sąsiedzi possesses an enormously moving dimension which is, unfortunately, among the “necessary losses” inherent in translation. The original Sąsiedzi is composed as a mosaic—a collage of juxtaposed, disparate voices woven into a text that is a kind of Bakhtinian dialogue between the author and his sources—voices separated from one another by time and space but also by class and education. As in Upiorna dekada, here Gross uses an unusual amount of direct citation. The contrast between the author’s sensitive (and self-conscious) literary Polish and his sources’ rough spoken dialect itself reveals much about the historian’s existential position vis-à-vis the interrogated ghosts of the past. Sąsiedzi is not an exhaustively researched monograph but rather a cameo piece, a microhistory (which reads very differently for Poles, who have an intuitive knowledge of a historical context generally unfamiliar to American readers), and a provocative essay about a historian’s struggle to come to terms with a particularly haunting archival find. Those who see Gross as relishing the opportunity to expose Poles as antisemites and Nazi collaborators are mistaken. They are neither very sensitive nor nuanced readers, for the author’s voice in Sąsiedzi (as in Upiorna dekada and in the responses to criticism of Sąsiedzi/Neighbors) is not triumphalist but anguished. Four years passed between the time he first encountered Wasersztajn’s testimony in the archives and the time he came to the decision to write about Jedwabne.53 Moreover, Gross very much feels himself to be a Pole; his insistence that Poles confront a past previously avoided is articulated in the first-person plural.54 In Wokół Sąsiadów: Polemiki i wyjaśnienia (Around Neighbors: Debates and Explanations), a collection of his responses during the first two years of the Jedwabne debate, Gross writes of how he, too, wishes there had been fewer Jews in the barn, that there had been more Germans present, that the Polish perpetrators had come from the margins of society; of how he, too, has for decades had difficulty absorbing the truth of PolishJewish relations during the war; of how what happened in Jedwabne is something he remains unable to explain to himself.55 Much of his writing in the past several years has contained a certain confessional motif, now part of his own intellectual biography. John Connelly points to Gross’s “revisions” vis-à-vis his own past work.56 Undoubtedly there are elements of revision, but the continuities, I suspect, remain more powerful. All of Gross’s work can be seen as part of a lifelong attempt to understand the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. He has always been deeply consumed by questions

16  marci shore

of morality posed by the totalitarian experience. A quarter-century ago, in Polish Society under German Occupation, Gross wrote of the impossibility of conceiving a theory of a univers concentrationaire, of how “the creation of a theory of this kind would represent the ultimate triumph of man’s intellect over his conscience.”57

Responses The Neighbors Respond, the English-language anthology edited by Antony Polonsky, the founder and editor of Polin, together with Joanna Michlic, is a collection of responses by Polish journalists, clergy, intellectuals, and others to Gross’s book. Authors include such figures as Władysław Bartoszewski, Stanisław Musiał, Adam Michnik, and Anna Bikont.58 The Neighbors Respond includes the editors’ excellent and accessible introduction to the Jedwabne debate as well as explanatory notes and a detailed chronology. The book represents a generous effort and could (and no doubt will) serve well as the main text for undergraduate seminars. Polonsky is, as always, impeccably fair-minded. He remains an extraordinary figure in his ability to maintain a balance between authentic empathy and ironic distance; that a Polish-Jewish dialogue exists at all, and is as civil and sophisticated as it is, is due in large measure to him. The collection he and Michlic have produced reveals a respect for the controversy as a historical subject unto itself, a chapter in Poland’s history. It contains as well a certain optimistic subtext that the dialogue is maturing and moving forward. For taken as a whole, the anthology testifies to the existence of Polish voices that are sensitive, inquisitive, and self-reflective. While many in Poland did respond with denial, counteraccusations, and antisemitic apologetics, others rose to the occasion and responded with great insight. The Neighbors Respond, although it does include a sampling of the so-called “apologist” camp (in particular, pieces by Antoni Macierewicz and Bogdan Musiał), omits the most radically far-right voices— for instance, those overtly claiming that Gross’s book is a manifestation of a Jewish conspiracy against Poles—the editors apparently having considered them “beyond the pale of civilized discourse.”59 As a whole, the collection gives the impression that there is reason to be optimistic about the future of Polish-Jewish dialogue, angst-laden as it may be. Among the most moving contributions in the volume is one titled “My Jedwabne,” written by a young historian. Marta Kurkowska-Budzan was born and raised in Jedwabne, and she had just begun an oral history project about her birthplace when Sąsiedzi appeared—and caused her informants to become reluctant to talk. Gross’s book, she writes, did not shock her, as she had first heard this story at the age of seven or eight, when her best friend

conversing with ghosts 17

revealed to her the “big secret” that “once Poles burned Jews alive in a barn. . . . Here, in Jedwabne.” The young girl added the colorful information that afterwards people had gone to the smoldering ruins of the barn in search of jewelry and gold teeth. At the time, Kurkowska-Budzan had no idea who these Jews were or had been. When she came home and inquired, her mother told her she was “too young for that kind of story.”60 A remarkable Polish institution decided that Poland was no longer too young for this kind of story. Instytut pamięci narodowej (Institute of National Remembrance [IPN]) came into being in December 1998. It was charged with the three tasks of collecting and administering the archives of the communist security organs, investigating Nazi and communist crimes against the Polish nation, and conducting educational activity. Since its founding, the IPN has been a major institutional force in prying open the archives in the postcommunist era. In response to the outbreak of the controversy over Sąsiedzi, the IPN commissioned over a dozen researchers to investigate. Subsequently the institute published in two volumes the results of incomparably more extensive archival work than Gross himself had done. The first consists of scholarly articles, the second of documents. The IPN team searched German and Soviet (Belarusian) archives as well as Polish ones, in addition to the Hoover Institution, Yad Vashem, and the Vatican archives.61 The studies published in the IPN’s first, interpretive volume cover the following topics: Poles and Jews in Jedwabne and the surrounding area prior to 22 June 1941; demographic change among Jedwabne’s Jewish population between the late nineteenth century and 1941; the attitude of local clergy toward antisemitism and the Holocaust; Polish-Jewish relations in western Belarus in 1939–41; pogroms and murders of Jews in the Łomża and Białystok regions in the summer of 1941; German Security Police and Security Service presence in the Łomża and Białystok regions in the summer of 1941; and criminal trials of those accused of murdering Jedwabne Jews in the context of the principles governing a fair trial.62 The IPN studies lack the elegance of Gross’s prose and reflect rather the Polish neopositivist tradition, according to which historians are not writers so much as factographers. The writing tends to be long-winded and rough; the volume was published quickly (and under pressure) and lacks tight editing. Yet the research, conducted with professionalism and integrity, is impressive. Revealed in this volume is another kind of influence Gross has exerted on Polish historians—a postmodern selfconsciousness slipping through the cracks in positivist scholarship. In his article on other instances of Polish violence against Jews in the Jedwabne area, Andrzej Żbikowski begins his longest section, on the pogrom in Radziłów (a story that distinguished itself by including two Poles sawing off the head of

18  marci shore

an 18-year-old girl while she was still alive) with a self-criticism: “In an article published in 1992 I failed to appreciate the significance of Menachem Finkelsztejn’s account, regarding—doubtlessly frightened by the emphatic quality of the descriptions of the violent acts—the facts he cited as exaggerated. I think that many readers of Sąsiedzi shared such an impression.”63 The legal scholar Andrzej Rzepliński introduces his subject with the remark that in the course of his scholarly research he has studied some 1,500 criminal trials, including 500 dealing with murder, and none has affected him as greatly as the 1949 Łomża trial of the men accused in the Jedwabne case, which continually evokes in him a feeling of powerlessness.64 Striking, too, is IPN president Leon Kieres’s introduction to the volume, in which he confesses: “When as the first president of the Institute of National Remembrance—Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation I swore before the Sejm of the Republic ‘to serve faithfully the Polish Nation,’ I did not anticipate that in doing so I was taking upon myself—in the name of the Polish state—the responsibility for the truth about the crime committed against fellow citizens of Jewish nationality in Jedwabne. A crime—in which it is still difficult for me to believe—committed with the decisive participation of people, who, like myself, spoke Polish.”65 The implications of the IPN’s investigation are wide-ranging. One of the results has been the discovery of archival documents attesting that while Jedwabne (together with Radziłów) was the most extreme case of Polish engagement in what the Nazis called Selbstreinigungsversuchen (“self-cleansing attempts”), it was not isolated. Local Polish populations took part in pogroms in other towns and villages in the kresy as well.66 Żbikowski’s book-length article examines Polish violence against Jews in the region containing Jedwabne between the outbreak of the German-Soviet war and mid-September 1941 (when the Germans had consolidated administrative rule over these territories).67 Żbikowski rejects the position of his co-contributors Tomasz Szarota, Edmund Dmitrów, and Marek Wierzbicki that armed Germans ordered the Poles to commit the murder in Jedwabne. He is rather persuaded that the dynamics between Germans and Poles vis-à-vis the Jews varied to some extent in each locality, particularly in June and July 1941, and that these varying, spontaneously emerging dynamics were decisive in the weeks before a more tightly coordinated blueprint for genocide was put into operation.68 Despite this local variety, it emerges from the article that certain “motifs” repeated themselves time and time again: Polish townspeople welcoming the Germans as liberators from Soviet oppression and żydokomuna; Polish participation in a local auxiliary police; the Germans giving the Polish townspeople time to “settle accounts” with the Jews; Jews being made to

conversing with ghosts 19

march through town holding pictures of Lenin and Stalin and singing Russian songs like “Moskva moia” (My Moscow); Jews forced to bury statues of Lenin; murders of individual Jews with sticks and iron canes; rapes of Jewish women; Germans photographing scenes of Poles attacking Jews while taking care not to appear in the photographs themselves; Jews being told they were being killed as a punishment for their cooperation with the Communists; Jews being herded into a town square, then into a barn, and set on fire. In studying the documents of these 61 trials, Żbikowski does not doubt that the UB functionaries were physically abusive during interrogations. He does doubt, however, whether the minimally educated UB interrogators could have invented such extraordinary tales on their own; he rejects the idea that the events described were fabricated, noting that these trials were less Stalinized than one might suspect, since these affairs were considered to be of minor importance. Moreover, he found that the judges were reluctant to convict suspects simply for participation in the murder of Jews.69 Andrzej Rzepliński reaches the same conclusion with respect to the 1949 Łomża trial. Rzepliński, a specialist in criminology and Polish legal history and a member of Poland’s Helsinki Committee, argues that the 1949 trial lacked a Stalinist character, and that on the contrary those conducting it seem to have intentionally avoided a full disclosure of the Poles’ participation in the Jedwabne murder. In Rzepliński’s account, the entire investigation was half-hearted; those conducting it were young, inexperienced, minimally educated, and, furthermore, negligent. Moreover, no one had any interest in exonerating the Germans at the expense of the Poles—on the contrary.70 Rzepliński’s contribution validates Gross’s use of the trial documents. Other IPN findings revise and expand on particular aspects of Gross’s account. For instance, IPN researchers concluded that there were most likely some dozen Germans present in Jedwabne on 10 July 1941, in any case no more than 20.71 In an article about demographics, Marcin Urynowicz concludes that Gross’s figure of 1,600 Jews in Jedwabne was too high, and that a more accurate figure would be in the range of 1,000.72 Overall, the IPN’s investigations have affirmed Sąsiedzi’s essential thesis, concluding that the Germans had “inspired” (invoking here the term inspiracja, which in Polish carries the sense of “provocation”) the massacre but had not employed direct coercion. Poles had done the killing. This “inspiration” was in accordance with head of the Reich Security Office Reinhard Heydrich’s June 1941 order to create no obstacles to “self-cleansing attempts” but rather to encourage them while “leaving no traces.”73 On 9 July 2002, IPN Prosecutor Radosław Ignatiew, having reviewed all the evidence collected, made the following statement: “With respect to the participation of the Polish population in the

20  marci shore

enactment of the crime, it is necessary to accept that it played the deciding role in the realization of a criminal plan . . . it is necessary to state that it is justifiable to ascribe to Germans, in terms of criminal justice, the perpetration sensu largo of this crime. The executors of these crimes, as perpetrators sensu stricto, were Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne and the surrounding area—men numbering at least 40.”74 In his introduction to volume 1, the IPN historian Paweł Machcewicz cites the following four motivations for the Jedwabne massacre: antisemitism; a desire to plunder Jewish property; German “inspiration”; and “revenge for actual or imagined Jewish cooperation with the Soviet occupiers.”75 There has been little controversy over the desire to appropriate property or the fact of German encouragement (with respect both to antisemitism in general and to the identification of Jews with communism in particular). Much less clear is how to apportion causality between prewar antisemitism and the Soviet occupation. IPN historians have documented how the economic depression of the 1930s contributed to a scapegoating of Jews (who were identified with both capitalism and communism) and a preoccupation with the threat of Jewish economic competition; how the local Catholic press publicized the “Jewish threat” in the decade before the war; how the right-wing Endecja movement was particularly strong in this region; how the 1930s saw numerous Endecja-organized antisemitic boycotts and “excesses.”76 Yet at the same time, Jedwabne was a relative “oasis of calm” in the Łomża area.77 The consensus among IPN historians is that neither Nazi propaganda nor the legacy of prewar antisemitism was the decisive factor in the Poles’ positive reception of the Germans and in their murder of the Jews. Instead, the desire for liberation from communist rule and for revenge on the Jews for the suffering experienced during the Soviet occupation played a major role. Certainly, as Paweł Machcewicz points out, the dismantling and burial of the Lenin statue suggests a ritualistic burial of (and blame for) Soviet rule.78 Marek Wierzbicki, who engages this topic in his article on Polish-Jewish relations in western Belarus during the Soviet occupation, vacillates somewhat awkwardly between describing the “myth existing to this day of all Jews’ betrayal during the Soviet occupation” and asserting that Jewish collaboration with the Soviets was in fact widespread.79 On one hand, he describes the hold the żydokomuna myth held over the local population and the fact that those Jews who did openly collaborate were particularly visible and their behavior easily generalized.80 He acknowledges, too, that “the Soviet occupation brought Jews no fewer disappointments and sufferings than it did to other national groups living in western Belarus.”81 On the other hand, Wierzbicki takes issue with Gross over the association of the Jews and the Sovi-

conversing with ghosts 21

etization of the kresy.82 It is true, Wierzbicki writes, that considerably more Jews than Poles participated in welcoming the Red Army, especially in those parts of western Belarus initially occupied by the Nazis in September 1939. He understands this in the context of impoverished Jewish youth attracted by the promise of equal rights, work, and the possibility of social advancement; and he cites the (oft-quoted) September 1940 comment by the local NKVD chief in Łomża: “The Jews supported us, and only they could always be seen. There reigned the fashion that the director of every institution and enterprise would boast about the fact that there was not a single Pole working for him. Many of us simply feared Poles.” When the Soviets rid themselves of the local Polish intelligentsia (either by deporting the local elite to Kazakhstan and Siberia or by executing them), Wierzbicki notes, many Jews took over their positions as teachers and civil servants. In this way, among others, the hierarchy of nationalities changed radically in a very short period of time. This was, Wierzbicki adds, a relatively short-term situation, as in early 1940 vostochniki began arriving to take over these positions.83 Whatever the numbers of Jews who actually collaborated with the Soviets, Wierzbicki attests, sources are unequivocal that Poles perceived the Jews as collaborating in denunciations, deportations, and arrests and in general as having betrayed Poles and Poland. The fourth deportation into the Soviet interior had begun locally on 19 June 1941 and was halted only by the German invasion; thus those Poles trying to escape deportation “treated the entrance of the German armies as a gift of Providence.” For that matter, Poles in the area that became western Belarus felt similar distaste and hatred toward Belarusians, many of whom were denounced as collaborators by Poles after the Germans arrived. Ultimately, Wierzbicki contends, “the growth in hostility toward Jews . . . had concrete causes and was not only an attempt to throw off responsibility onto the victims of the pogroms from the summer of 1941.”84

An Intimate Conversation Wierzbicki walks a delicate line between explaining and justifying. The position he takes is affirmed by a Polish historian much older than Wierzbicki, Tomasz Strzembosz. In a certain twist of irony, one revealing the intensely personal nature of the Jedwabne debate, Gross had first written of Szmul Wasersztajn’s story in a Festschrift for Strzembosz, who has devoted his long scholarly career to historical research on the Łomża region.85 Among the other contributors was Strzembosz’s and Gross’s long-time close colleague Tomasz Szarota, whose November 2000 interview in Gazeta Wyborcza inaugurated the Jedwabne debate.86 Szarota expressed much skepticism about the allegedly minimal role of Germans and questioned how 1,500 strong, healthy

22  marci shore

people would allow themselves to be led to death by fewer than 100 people armed only with sticks.87 Szarota expressed skepticism, moreover, about his friend’s qualifications (Gross was originally trained as a sociologist) to be writing history in general and this history in particular. He made various disparaging comments about Gross’s “emotional, essayistic style” and his “uncritical relationship to arbitrarily selected sources.”88 The next week, Gross answered Szarota: Let’s say, that in fact a German police battalion was in Jedwabne that day and that Poles—under pressure (by local scum? the town administration? public opinion? German gendarmes?), embittered with the conviction that during the Soviet occupation Jews cooperated with the NKVD (although in the case of Jedwabne we know for certain only that two of those accused in the Łomża trial, Laudański and Bardoń, were previously NKVD collaborators)—murdered their Jewish neighbors: women, children, old people—everyone whom they fell upon that day. The first question is: do there exist some parameters, pressures, and embitterments that would cause the Jedwabne murder of Jews committed by Poles to be “understandable”? Can we imagine a sequence of events leading to the murder in Jedwabne that would allow us in conclusion to say something in the way of: “aha, I understand,” or “it was a monstrous crime, but after all,” or “It’s terrible, unforgivable, well, but even so”?89

Following this exchange between Szarota and Gross in Gazeta Wyborcza, a discussion was organized at the Historical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Tomasz Strzembosz was present but said nothing.90 Afterwards, Szarota published an article with the following “P.S.: I must candidly admit to those who attended the meeting at which Professor Gross took part at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Historical Institute, where I have worked for 38 years, that it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life.”91 Not long afterwards, Strzembosz broke his silence. When he did, it was in an essay engaging not the Jedwabne massacre itself but rather the role of Polish Jews in the Soviet occupation of the eastern territories. In an article titled “Przemilczana kolaboracja” (Collaboration Passed Over in Silence), Strzembosz tells a story of treason and betrayal. The Poles suffered terribly following the arrival of the Red Army. “By contrast,” Strzembosz writes: the Jewish population, especially young people and the urban poor, staged a mass welcome for the invading army and took part in introducing the new order—some with weapons in hand. . . . This has also been reported in the works of Gross himself. . . . Moreover, the “guards” and “militias” that

conversing with ghosts 23

sprouted like mushrooms after a rainfall in the wake of the Soviet aggression consisted largely of Jews. Moreover, Jews engaged in acts of rebellion against the Polish state by occupying localities, setting up revolutionary committees there, arresting and executing representatives of the Polish state authorities, and attacking smaller and even quite large units of the Polish Army (as in Grodno). . . . This [the three-day battle between Jewish rebels and the Polish Army and police in Grodno and other areas, revolts directed against the Polish state] was armed collaboration, siding with the enemy, treason committed during days of defeat.92

He adds, “Prof[essor] Gross therefore lacks justification when he states in Neighbors that, ‘to put it simply, enthusiastic Jewish response to entering Red Army units was not a widespread phenomenon at all.’”93 Strzembosz’s tone is much more impassioned than Wierzbicki’s. “Did the Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne and the surrounding villages enthusiastically welcome the Germans as saviors?” he writes, “Yes, they did! If someone pulls me out of a blazing house in which I could burn to a crisp in seconds, I will embrace and thank that person—even if the next day I regard him as yet another mortal enemy.”94 Rzeczpospolita, the Polish newspaper that published Strzembosz’s piece, subsequently held a round-table discussion in March 2001. The round table also included Radosław Ignatiew, Andrzej Kaczyński, Paweł Machcewicz, and Andrzej Żbikowski, but it was in essence very much a personal conversation between Gross and Strzembosz. Here they confronted each another about the role of Jews in the Soviet occupation. If Strzembosz had been upset about Sąsiedzi, Gross was equally upset about “Collaboration Passed Over in Silence.” “So the population generally believed that the Jews had collaborated with the Soviets,” Gross said. “This is just another way of saying that the Polish population was antisemitic.” He continued: In your article, Tomasz, . . . you say a lot of things that are obviously untrue. First of all, from the beginning to end you use large-scale quantifiers such as: the Jews persecuted the Poles; the Jews sent Poles into banishment; the Jews shot at the Polish Army. This is the mirror image of Shamir’s famous remark about the Poles drinking in antisemitism with their mothers’ milk. Your image of Jews is that they are Pole-haters. I wonder what kind of sensitivity enables us to reverse stereotypes in that way. Second, when you say the Jews sent the Poles to Siberia, it’s an outright lie. There were proportionately more Jewish victims of these deportations than Polish victims. Between one-fourth and one-third of the deported

24  marci shore civilians were Jews. Your article says: the Poles are persecuted by the Jews; the Jews send them to God knows where. Well, it was not like that. The Jews suffered just as much as everyone else under the Soviet occupation, if not more. The whole stereotype of Jews supporting the Bolsheviks and Communists is nonsense.95

Now Strzembosz gave an answer that was much more rational than the tone of his previous article might have led one to expect from him. Supporting the Soviet system, Strzembosz pointed out, in no way protected one from joining the victims of that system. For someone’s attitude toward the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union’s attitude toward that person were, he told Gross, two entirely different issues. “That is why,” he said, “information about 30, 40, or 5 percent of the Jews being deported is no answer to the question about the extent of their collaboration with the occupation regime. Why? Because that was a system that devoured its own children.”96 Strzembosz further emphasized the distinction between expressing happiness at the sight of the Red Army and subsequently collaborating with the occupiers. Much more disturbing for him than the triumphal arches with which Jews welcomed the Red Army, Strzembosz remarked, were those instances in what became western Belarus when Jews opened fire on Poles. Gross responded with the question: “Do you think Wanda Wasilewska, one of the main collaborators, attended synagogue? What about Feliks Edmundovich Dzierżyński, who founded the KGB?”97 The question of Jewish collaboration with the Soviets was one of two anguished motifs of the Rzeczpospolita round table. The other was one of silence. “I have one question,” Gross said to his interlocutors at a certain moment. “How is it that for fifty years, not a single historian dealing with the German occupation and Polish-Jewish relations has uttered so much as one word on the dramatic fate of the Jews of Jedwabne? This question is addressed to you in particular, Tomasz, because as a historian you cover not just that period but that very region. Why have you never written about it? Didn’t you know anything about it?”98 Strzembosz defended himself. He was not a historian of Polish-Jewish relations. He had been writing about other things, in particular about the Polish opposition to Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941, before the Jedwabne massacre. He added, “If I had gone any further, I might have been found dead in the mud. That was made clear to me.”99 It was not an answer Gross accepted. In a response published shortly after the Rzeczpospolita discussion, Gross wrote of how Strzembosz had devoted decades of his life to historical research about this region during World War II. In addition to ar-

conversing with ghosts 25

chival research, Strzembosz had conducted interviews in Jedwabne and the surrounding areas. Perhaps, as Strzembosz suggested, his local informants had warned him not to ask questions about the Jews—but in this case would a historian not suspect that they had something to hide? In questioning local inhabitants about their experiences during the years of occupation, how much effort would one have to exert so as to avoid this knowledge? It is here that Gross becomes most harsh: “In spinning these reflections, I am in no way attempting to affix onto Strzembosz the label of an ignoramus. Because the conjecture of ignorance is a very kind explanation for the silence about the fate of the Jews in his work. An alternative hypothesis would be that he knew about the fate of the Jews and wrote nothing.”100 Strzembosz now addressed a short verse to his former friend who had spent three decades abroad: “Pański konik rączy / skry podkówka pali / Chłopskie nogi choć powolne / ale zajdą dalej” (Your lordship’s pony is nimble / from under the little horseshoe sparks fly / Peasants’ legs though not so quick / will pass your pony by).101 Szarota, for his part, defended Strzembosz. “Gross cannot understand,” Szarota writes in an article published after the Rzeczpospolita discussion, “why no one had studied Jedwabne earlier. After all, he says, it was enough to go there, go into some corner bar, and start talking with people. My answer to that is that history is not written by going into bars.”102 This discussion among Gross, Szarota, and Strzembosz was one of the most wrenching to occur during the debate, in large part because it involved relationships extending back many years. While expressing much criticism of Gross’s methodology, emphases, and contextualization (or rather lack thereof), however, neither Szarota nor Strzembosz—nor any other serious Polish historians, however harshly they judged Sąsiedzi—ever denied the basic fact that local Poles murdered the Jews of Jedwabne.103 To Strzembosz’s poem Gross responded with a fragment from The Stories of Rabbi Nachman: They met a man in black garments on a black horse. Without a word the rider directed a penetrating gaze at the young man, who suddenly had the impression that he should touch the horse with his cane. He did so, and at once the horse began to sing a moonlit melody in a beautiful voice. The black rider smiled with forbearance and said: “Do you want only to amuse yourself with your cane forever? Has it not occurred to you that you received it for something greater? Have you not discovered that the piece of wood you were given evokes from every living creature voices of the heart and that you, as far as you possess it, can—with your heart—understand every living creature?” With these words he turned his horse around and left.104

26  marci shore

Further Thoughts The IPN volumes in a way represent the greatest success of Sąsiedzi/Neighbors. They are at once a critique of Gross’s work and the highest compliment paid to it.105 In July 2003, Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski traveled to Ukraine to observe the sixtieth anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Poles by Ukrainians in Volhynia. Poles watching the news reports waited for an apology from Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma on behalf of those Ukrainians who had murdered Poles in 1943. “We swallowed Jedwabne— they have to swallow Volhynia,” a Polish colleague told me. Jews, too, have some experience in confronting things in their own past they would prefer not to contemplate; there were many who refused to “swallow” accusations of the Judenrats’ collaboration with the Nazis when Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem first appeared.106 Both Gross’s supporters and his critics agree that the fate of Jedwabne’s Jews was contingent on the Nazi invasion of Poland. Had it not been for the Germans, the massacre would not have happened. The pressing question of historical contingency in the debate is, rather, a different one: would the massacre have occurred had it not been for the Soviet occupation? Taken together, the IPN’s Wokół Jedwabnego (Around Jedwabne), Gross’s Wokół Sąsiedzów, and Polonsky’s and Michlic’s The Neighbors Respond reveal how the question of whether it was the Poles who murdered the Jews in Jedwabne quickly metamorphosed into the question of whether the Jews in the kresy collaborated with the Soviets. In the end, IPN historians noted the impossibility of establishing precisely how large a part of the Jewish population welcomed the Soviet occupiers—it was possible only to establish that some part of the Jewish population expressed happiness at the arrival of the Red Army and that the majority of Poles in the kresy identified Jews with the Soviet regime.107 In this way it becomes extremely difficult to separate the question of Jews’ collaboration with the Soviets from the Poles’ widespread perception that the Jews collaborated en masse. On one hand, Jews were indisputably overrepresented in the rather small interwar Polish Communist Party (as well as in the constituent communist parties of western Belarus and western Ukraine); on the other hand, Jews who became Communists represented only a small fraction of the Jewish population of Poland.108 Similarly, there were (some? many? very many?) Jews who visibly welcomed the Red Army while most of the Jewish population remained inhospitable to communism—which was itself, after all, inhospitable to the traditional Jewish life that prevailed in the kresy. With respect to historical memory something else plays a role as well: although Poles and Jews suffered equally when deported to Soviet labor camps, it is

conversing with ghosts 27

nonetheless the case that “objectively” (to use a favorite communist term), Jews had a better chance of survival in a Soviet labor camp than they did in the Nazi occupation zone, where they were all marked for extermination on the basis of race. (Among the dark ironies of the war was that deportation into the Soviet interior—even in the most abysmal conditions—saved the lives of many Polish Jews.) Such was not the case for Poles, who in contrast had a better chance of survival in the Nazi-held territories. More broadly (and more positively), Jan Gross’s work and the whole of the Jedwabne discussion have served to integrate the Polish-Jewish debate in a new way into the larger history of European totalitarianism. In this respect Gross represents an increasing inclination among historians to reject what has until now been a fairly dichotomous (and artificial) division between East European history and East European Jewish history. The Jedwabne case is so compelling not only (and not primarily) because it offers an opportunity to revisit the accusation that “the Poles drink in their antisemitism with their mothers’ milk,” but rather because it stands at the nexus of the questions of modernity, revolution, and totalitarianism.109 Jedwabne, a tiny town in “the backward half of a backward European country,” far away from Moscow and Berlin and even from Warsaw, was passed between Nazism and Stalinism three times.110 It was a case involving several hundred people in the context of tens of millions killed in the war, yet it reveals so much about the great questions not only of Polish history but also of European history in the twentieth century. Among other things, it has led to a revisiting of the half-century-long discussion about the relationship between left-wing and right-wing totalitarianism. We now know much more about how both the Nazi and Stalinist regimes exploited local potential for “self-cleansing.” Gross follows in the tradition of the Frankfurt School—of Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno—in trying to understand how modernity led to terror; he follows as well Christopher Browning in asking how “ordinary men” could become murderers.111 Was the experience of Soviet occupation so decisive because it increased resentment against Jews, or rather because in the Soviet regime’s endeavor “to separate [its] subjects from their own consciences” it fundamentally altered normative conceptions?112 How does the experience of one totalitarian regime affect how individuals respond to the next? Recent work in Soviet history has explored the ways in which Stalinism was creative (in the non-normative sense) in addition to repressive.113 Gross’s speculation about the role of spontaneity and local participation in the Holocaust allows perhaps for a more active, creative subject than was previously imagined—or desired. The history of the kresy can also serve as a case study of possibilities

28  marci shore

exposed when hierarchies invert themselves and fluctuate radically in very short periods of time and traditional social constraints—notions of the boundaries of the possible—dissolve. Jedwabne was a microcosm of a part of the world struggling with the tensions between modernity and tradition, ideology and self-interest, agency and conformity, collaboration and resistance, cooperation as personal conviction and cooperation as opportunism, pressures “from above” and pressures “from below.” Arendt herself, having spent the postwar years consumed by the problem of “crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive,” changed her mind after watching the Eichmann trial as to whether the evil of Nazism was “radical” or “banal.”114 What, after all, do we understand about human identity and human relationships when one totalitarian regime replaces another in dizzying succession? In a time and place where there seemed to be no exit or redemption, Jedwabne tells us what was possible.

3

The Soviet Union, the Holocaust, and Auschwitz harvey asher

B

etween 700,000 and 3,000,000 Jews were killed in the Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet Union.1 Within the prewar Soviet borders, the Nazis saw a particular urgency in rapidly exterminating the Jews, whom they regarded as the mainstay of the Bolshevik regime. The Israeli scholar Mordecai Altshuler has studied 22 ghettos in 5 Soviet cities: in 5 of these ghettos, all the Jews were killed in an average of 23 days following the Nazi occupation; in 9 of the ghettos, within 99 days; and in 8 of them, an average of 295 days.2 The primary executioners were the Einsatzgruppen, whom the notorious Commissar Order of 6 June 1941 absolved from any punishment for killing Communists, political commissars, partisans, and collaborators; Jews were included in the latter two groups. From Hitler’s point of view, Bolshevism and Judaism were equivalents, since communist ideology was a Jewish weapon for seizing control of the world. Most of the Jewish victims were machine-gunned in areas near the towns in which they had been rounded up, and some were killed in public before local spectators. Depending on time and locality, the Einsatzgruppen were aided in their grim mission by Wehrmacht units, special police units, Waffen SS brigades, and the local population, whose collaboration was most extensive in the Baltic states, Moldavia, and western Ukraine. The greatest number of executions of Soviet Jews took place from 22 June 1941 until the winter of 1941–42. From the beginning of 1943, when the tide of the war turned, until the Nazis were removed from Soviet territory in 1944, the numbers declined, although Jews continued to be murdered even as the German army retreated. 29

30  harvey asher

Despite the enormous loss of Jewish lives, most Soviet accounts of the Great Patriotic War (the eastern front of World War II) did not treat the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish phenomenon. The plight of the Soviet Jews was portrayed as part of a larger trend: the murder by the Germans of civilians of all nationalities—Russians, Ukrainians, Gypsies, and so on. Indeed, until recently, Soviet literature on the extermination of the Jews used the words unichtozhenie (annihilation) and katastrofa (catastrophe) instead of Holocaust, which denotes uniquely Jewish aspects of the Nazi Final Solution.3 There have been a number of explanations for why the Soviets tended to universalize or underreport the specifics of the extermination of Soviet Jews by the Nazis. The recent memoir by General Vasilii Iakovlevich Petrenko, Do i posle Osventsima (Before and After Auschwitz, translated into French as Avant et après Auschwitz), claims that Stalin’s unwillingness to make the liberation of Auschwitz a military priority, despite his knowledge of what was happening to the Jews there, derived from his “bestial antisemitism” but offers no proof for this assertion.4 However, Stalin’s personal feelings about the Jews were held in check by the Bolsheviks’ history of defining themselves as protectors of the weak and oppressed and as fighters against the enemies of social justice and national equality, at least until a Russocentric antisemitism moved to center stage in 1949. Even then, antisemitism hardly explains all of Stalin’s policies toward the Jews during the Holocaust. Some of his leading hatchetmen—such as Lazar´ Moiseevich Kaganovich, one of the most brutal enforcers of collectivization—were Jewish. Also, Stalin tolerated his daughter Svetlana’s short romance in 1942 with Aleksei Iakovlevich Kapler, the Jewish film writer, and her 1944 marriage to a young Jewish student, Grigorii Iosifovich Morozov. Stalin’s policies toward the Jews seem contradictory. Right up until his death, some Stalin Prizes continued to be awarded to Jewish writers and musicians. Also, although the reasons are complex, the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize the state of Israel.5 Stalin’s antisemitism was further restrained by the internationalism of the communist ideology. Its message of universal brotherhood and equality acted as a barrier to overt antisemitism.6 To focus unduly on Stalin’s role, and on antisemitism in general, one would have to ignore the place of contingency and pragmatism in specific Soviet decisions regarding the Holocaust. It also diverts attention from broader ideological considerations, particularly the Party’s unwillingness to define its Jews as members of a nation and its call for their complete assimilation into the general population. A more fruitful approach would tie Soviet attitudes on the Jewishness of the Holocaust and concomitant actions by the authorities toward the Jews in

the soviet union, the holocaust, and auschwitz 31

the occupied territories to the Party’s evolving tactical and strategic goals, for there does not seem to have been an unchanging party line on how to respond to, or label, the Soviet Jewish victims. Moreover, the shifting Soviet positions cannot be studied in isolation from the responses of the Allies waging war against the Nazis. A key source for studying this question is the memoir by General Petrenko. The last survivor among the four generals who conducted the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, he was born in 1912 into a Ukrainian peasant family. He had a long and distinguished military career, characterized by battlefield bravery that won him numerous military decorations, including the coveted title of Hero of the Soviet Union. His combat experience during the Great Patriotic War was varied and vast, including action at the battle of Kursk, the 1943 campaign for the Dnieper, the siege of Łwów-Sandomierz, and the Vistula-Oder operation that led to the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. He was only 32 years old when the camp fell. After the war, he became a professor at the General Headquarters Academy (Frunze Academy), where he worked for 20 years, serving as chairman of the Operations Department after receiving his doctorate in military studies. In 1977, he retired and became involved in the activities of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans. Some two-thirds of the memoir is biographical, dealing with subjects unrelated to the liberation of Auschwitz: family life, marriage, and military training and service, as well as observations about the Russian Civil War, the Leningrad Affair, and the East German revolt of 1953. For the most part, Petrenko unquestioningly supported party policy; for example, he argued that by capturing Auschwitz, the Soviet army “had to fulfill the historic mission of liberating the Polish people from the yoke of German fascism and helping them establish a free and happy life.” 7 An exception to his lack of political involvement occurred in 1951, when he was stationed in East Germany and complained to a Soviet general about the impact of Stalinist repression on the military. When warned that such complaints could adversely affect his career, he dropped the subject. “From then on, I paid attention to my political conversations with the general,” Vladimir Fedorovich Tolubko.8 He also quietly went along with the sanctions imposed on his friend and colleague, the dissident General Petr Grigor´evich Grigorenko. At best, one can say that Petrenko’s attitude toward Soviet policies was naive, if not compliant. The sections of the book dealing with the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz indicate Petrenko’s complete surprise at the horrors he encountered there, but the experience had no immediate or long-term effect on his personality or broader outlook. He says that neither he nor any other

32  harvey asher

army commander ever received a precise order to liberate the camp as either a primary or secondary goal of the Vistula-Oder operation.9 He heard from a colleague that, when shown the operation plan drawn up by General Ivan Stepanovich Konev, Stalin simply pointed to the map of the region and said “for the gold,” from which the officer presenting the plan concluded that they needed to take all possible measures to preserve Silesia’s industrial potential.10 Petrenko conjectures that if instead of “gold, ” Stalin had uttered the word “horror,” the Vistula-Oder commanders would have taken measures to defeat even more rapidly the “Hitlerites” (the term generally used by Soviet writers for the Nazis) who defended the region of the camp, thereby maximizing the number of prisoners who could have been saved. But the army leaders never received anything even approximating an order calling for the liberation of Auschwitz. The directive of 17 January, received by the commanders of the First Ukrainian Front (the troops engaged in the Vistula siege) from the General Headquarters (Stavka), called for the offensive to cross the Oder River no later than 30 January, then to establish a reinforced position on its west bank.11 The main military objective remained to capture cities all along the front. Petrenko asks the reader to imagine what would have happened if all the First Ukrainian Front armies had followed the directive exactly, reaching the Oder no later than 30 January. Preparing to cross it and consolidate their position would have taken at least three or four more days, the time required for expelling the German defenders.12 Under this scenario, the Soviet armies would not have been able to take the industrial sector of Silesia and the surrounding camps before 2–3 February. On entering Auschwitz, they would have found only a mass of ruins and smoldering furnaces, but not a single living prisoner. Fortunately, Petrenko tells us, General Konev did not follow the 17 January directive to the letter but carried it out flexibly based on his strategic knowledge, war experience, and analysis of the battlefield situation. He took the initiative of avoiding a frontal assault, going around the German fortifications with tank units before linking up with other troops to attack from the north, east, and south, forcing the defending Germans to flee to open terrain and destroying them there. His decision to adjust the battle plan for seizing the coal region of Dąbrowa (Dombrovskii) and nearby Silesian cities proved decisive.13 Hence the directive from the Stavka was carried out before the 30 January deadline, which made it possible to liberate Auschwitz on 27 January and save 7,000 prisoners (of whom only 4,880 were alive a month later) from certain death. After the war, Petrenko resumed a normal life, not pondering deeply the

the soviet union, the holocaust, and auschwitz 33

implications of the Vistula-Oder campaign and his Auschwitz experience. This changed in 1981, when he participated as a Soviet delegate—the only one to have taken part in the liberation of Auschwitz—at the International Liberators Conference that was organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in Washington, DC. Following his presentation, Petrenko became infuriated by a question from a State Department employee about whether the Soviet armies had deliberately slowed their advance to allow more time for the Nazis to exterminate the camp prisoners. Interpreting the query as a reproach to the courageous Soviet army, he emphatically asserted that all Soviet units, including his own Sixtieth Army, had pressed on without delay to fulfill their military goals. In time, Petrenko wondered if he had been completely truthful in his response; after all, neither he nor the other commanders had received a precise order to liberate Auschwitz-Birkenau. Troubled by this thought, he decided to consult the Russian archives. He also read memoirs by the other generals involved in the battle and liberation to test his assumption that the commanders were kept in the dark. His research confirmed that the Soviet authorities had not only failed to make seizing the camps a priority but had essentially withheld all the (considerable) information they had about what was happening there from the commanders of the First Ukrainian Front.14 In addition to Stalin’s antisemitism, Petrenko attributes the decision to suppress information about the camps to Stalin’s fear that his people and army might learn that the Germans had captured huge numbers of Soviet soldiers, largely because of Stalin’s faulty military strategy. Those soldiers— who had been surrounded by the advancing German army and, bereft of supplies, had surrendered in droves in the early phase of the conflict—had been depicted to the public as courageous martyrs who continued to fight for the motherland until their last breath; in reality, however, they had been taken prisoner and either were executed without offering resistance or died from hunger, cold, or slave labor. This led Stalin to avoid highlighting anything about the horrors of the death camps. Petrenko concludes by suggesting that the Soviet role in the liberation of Auschwitz must be compared with the policies of the British and the Americans, who also knew of the camp’s existence. Since 1981, General Petrenko has been invited to numerous Holocaust conferences in Israel, the United States, and Brazil, among other places, where he has shared his story, lobbied for memorials to Jewish victims, participated in Day of Remembrance ceremonies, spoken out against antisemitism, met with Elie Wiesel and other prominent Holocaust scholars, and lambasted Holocaust deniers. He has received numerous honors for his efforts, includ-

34  harvey asher

ing honorary citizenship in Trenton, New Jersey, and a gold medal from the Jewish community in São Paolo in 1993 (on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising). He recently proposed, thus far unsuccessfully, that 27 January be made an international day of remembrance for the prisoners of the Nazi camps and the soldiers who shed their blood for their liberation. General Petrenko wrote his memoir in 1999, at the age of 87; until his death in 2003, he lived on Victory Square in Moscow, perhaps not coincidentally located only a few steps from the first museum of the Holocaust to open in Russia. Petrenko’s call for a comparative perspective on Allied Auschwitz policies makes sense. There is strong evidence that U.S. and British forces could have destroyed the deadly installation had they chosen to do so, especially after 1944, when the task was first proposed and after most of its victims had already perished. In 1944, the Allies acquired the Foggia base in southern Italy, and the First Air Force was given sufficient long-range bombers and suitable equipment.15 Reconnaissance photos of the I. G. Farben Auschwitz facilities had been taken on 26 February and 4 April as part of a plan to bomb its factories at Auschwitz III (Monowitz), less than five miles from the gas chambers; those photos also showed the rail cars leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as Jewish arrivals marching to their death.16 The first raids against syntheticoil targets in Upper Silesia did not take place, however, until July and August because, presumably, the aircraft were being used elsewhere. Even if the B-17s and B-24s had been used for the saturation bombing of Auschwitz III (the 620-mile distance made smaller aircraft less suitable), they had a direct-hit rate of only 2–3 percent, which makes it unlikely that they could have taken out the gas chambers and crematoria without obliterating the adjacent prisoner barracks. On several occasions, the U.S. Air Force used shuttle bases in Ukraine as layover points for raids deep into Central Europe, but the Soviets carefully scrutinized all targets, making the use of these bases problematic and ineffective. Several missions were flown in July and August 1944; the last took place on 18 September, when 107 B-17s dropped 120 containers of supplies into Warsaw, most of which fell into German hands.17 Among the reasons cited for the unwillingness of the British and the Americans to bomb Auschwitz were the absence of the right kind of aircraft, fear of bombs killing the prisoners, the ease with which the Germans could repair the rail lines, Roosevelt’s unawareness of the bombing proposal, opposition from some leaders of the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency for Israel, and the belief that the Germans would find other ways to kill the prisoners even if the gas chambers and crematoria were destroyed.

the soviet union, the holocaust, and auschwitz 35

The Holocaust scholar Henry Feingold believes that a more feasible option was to launch bombing raids in retaliation for Nazi atrocities in the east. At a minimum, making clear that such attacks were retaliatory would have made the German public, whose cities were being bombed anyway, aware of what was happening in the death camps. It would also have increased the costs for countries that cooperated with the Germans by deporting their own Jews. But this option also had liabilities: if Germany had suspended the Final Solution in return for concessions in the air war, the British and Americans would have lost the moral high ground by allowing the Nazis to decide when to halt and restart the killings; in addition, they would have weakened their own position vis-à-vis the Russians in the peace negotiations.18 As for the Soviet Union, following its success at Stalingrad and the summer offensive that began in June 1943, Red Air Force tactical units were clearly closer to the target than U.S. bombers. Richard Breitman contends that they failed to act “because the Soviet regime closely resembled Nazi Germany in its contempt for humanitarian principle, if not in the intensity of its antisemitism.”19 Given the war of annihilation being waged in the east against Judeo-Bolshevism, however, it might be supposed that the Russians had greater incentives to bomb the camps. Yet Moscow’s silence was, if anything, deeper than that of Washington and London. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Moscow ever considered bombing Auschwitz.20 If (like this writer) we do not see Stalin’s antisemitism as the principal issue, then what accounts for the Soviets’ inaction? Part of the answer is that, like the Americans and the British, the Soviets never made rescuing the Jews a military priority; indeed, all three powers had domestic reasons to go out of their way to avoid turning the conflict into a “Jewish war.” There could have been a dramatic rise in domestic antisemitism if the war came to be seen as “instigated” by the Jews, just as Nazi propaganda claimed. A focus on the Jews would also have interfered with efforts (important for the Soviet army’s morale) to portray the war as crucial to the survival of the motherland or to humanity’s liberation from Nazi tyranny. Soviet reluctance to go after the camps was thus predicated on the same assumptions that governed Allied hesitancy and led all three powers to conclude that winning the war as quickly as possible was the best way to save those being persecuted and targeted for elimination—of whom the Jews were not the only, albeit the best known, victims. Not all writers accept this kind of “leveling” of the Soviet and Western positions on bombing Auschwitz. For them, this equivalency disappears when extended to other possible forms of intervention. For example, the Israeli scholar Yitzhak Arad notes that neither the Soviet government nor the

36  harvey asher

Communist Party appealed to underground organizations or the population in the occupied territories to help Soviet Jews, nor did radio broadcasts or dropped leaflets mention their special plight.21 Actually, one cannot say that the Soviet media never discussed the suffering of the Jews. Even when accounts of atrocities ignored the victims’ nationality, especially if they were Jews, the mere listing of names permitted inferences about their origins. It is also true, however, that Jews were often last on the list of victims or were designated as “others.” When crimes specifically against Jews were acknowledged, the deaths of women and children were often cited separately, creating the impression that they were not Jewish.22 Between 11 November 1938 and the end of June 1939, however, Pravda published 39 reports, articles, and commentaries about attacks on Jews under German rule. Reports also appeared in the Yiddish press. Even during the 22 months of the Stalin-Hitler pact, when the Soviet media usually refrained from covering anti-Jewish atrocities, many Jews had access to information on the subject; and, as detailed below, some stories about German anti-Jewish atrocities reappeared in the Soviet press almost immediately after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Mordecai Altshuler therefore properly concludes that a lack of information was not an important factor for those Jews who chose not to flee the German invaders. Rather, the key variable was the time that elapsed between the beginning of the invasion and the actual Nazi occupation of a particular territory.23 The dissemination of information is discussed by Ilya Altman (Il´ia Al´tman) and Claudio Ingerflom in their thoughtful essay, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste, 1933–2001,” which appears in the French translation of Petrenko’s book. They wisely remind us to avoid easy generalizations about the Soviet Union’s treatment of its indigenous Jews as well as those who fell into its hands in the course of the war. They reject the thesis that the Soviet Jews’ utter lack of preparedness for the brutality of the Nazis was due to the growth of antisemitism in the USSR, especially in the 1930s. They also challenge the notion that the Soviet press ignored how central antisemitism was to National Socialism and instead claimed that German fascism was a reactionary movement directed only against the proletariat. Finally, they take issue with the idea that the Soviet authorities did all they could to hide evidence of the Nazi war against the Jews. On the contrary, they convincingly demonstrate that Kremlin policy was not static in the 1933–1945 period. Sometimes it was dominated by ideology, at other times by contingency; most often, it was a combination of both. Their discontinuity thesis is at odds with explanations that stress the dominance of Marxist ideology in determining the Soviet outlook on the

the soviet union, the holocaust, and auschwitz 37

Holocaust.24 For example, the Jewish Antifascist Committee (which had been approved by Stalin—see below) appealed to international Jewry on the basis of a Jewish identity that transcended national borders. This directly conflicted with the official ideology, which not only shunned Jewish internationalism (Zionism) but even denied the Jews of the Soviet Union national status on the grounds that they lacked a common culture, language, economy, and territory. This reluctance to recognize Jews as a nationality was not peculiar to the Soviets; Anglo-American and French liberals had similar reservations, albeit for different reasons. Their own unwillingness to grant the Jews separate status was, according to some historians, a key reason why the Allies refused to assign priority to aiding the Jews.25 Altman and Ingerflom trace the Soviet regime’s shifting attitudes and behavior toward the Jews over four periods. The first runs from Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. A key Politburo decision of September 1935 stopped the flow of Jewish refugees from Germany by requiring them to demonstrate proletarian origins and excessively large financial resources and to accept Soviet citizenship and compulsory physical labor under People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) supervision.26 Offers of financial assistance from Jewish organizations were rejected. Nonetheless, stories about the Nazi persecutions appeared fairly regularly in the Soviet press and on radio broadcasts. The removal of Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov and his entourage in the Foreign Ministry between 1936 and 1939, according to Altman, was not so much dictated by antisemitism as reflective of a policy that now sought closer relations with Nazi Germany. Moreover, these men were only dismissed, not arrested. A number of important Jewish diplomats remained at their posts, like Ivan Mikhailovich Maiskii, the Soviet ambassador to London, or were even promoted, like Solomon Abramovich Lozovskii, the future head of the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformbiuro). Even Litvinov later received important new responsibilities, including a 1941 appointment as ambassador to the United States. From the annexations of eastern Poland and northern Bukovina permitted by the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement until the June 1941 German invasion, the Soviet Union acquired some 2,000,000 additional Jews. Initially, the Germans showed little zeal in preventing Polish Jews in their occupation zone from fleeing to Soviet territory. Most of those who did so, however, were driven back by border guards and the Soviet army. Of the refugees whom the Soviets accepted (even providing transportation for them, including those from Vilnius) following the final disposition of the Polish territories on 28 September 1939, the NKVD sent back the politically and socially suspect, the

38  harvey asher

aged, and the infirm. The remainder, many of whom were Jews, had to choose between working in labor camps in the northern and eastern USSR and being deported back to the German zone. Those who stayed and agreed to work became Soviet citizens. Within 21 months of the Soviet conquest of eastern Poland, shtetl life and its traditions were virtually destroyed. Jewish leaders were arrested and deported, youth organizations abolished, and synagogues closed or used as warehouses or stables. Furthermore, the Sabbath was abolished as a holy day, and Jewish holidays and festivals were proscribed. Yet the Soviet assault against Jewish practices, customs, and traditions is best seen as part of a broader offensive against the cultural “backwardness” of the traditional shtetl rather than as evidence of racial or religious antisemitism.27 In late 1939, about 40,000 Jewish refugees agreed to work in the Donbas mines and Ural factories of the Soviet interior; most eventually fled, despite strict Soviet laws prohibiting flight, as they became economically and ideologically disillusioned.28 Those refugees who did not agree to work and apply for citizenship, as well as those who refused to return to German-occupied Poland, were deported to Siberia or the north. Of this group, Jews made up 30 percent. An additional 25,000 Jews who asked to be sent to Palestine or elsewhere were sent back to German-occupied territory. Harsh as Soviet policy may appear, Altman and Ingerflom contend that the offer of Soviet citizenship was exceptional at a time when most countries refused to grant Jewish refugees even temporary residence permits.29 This contention is on the mark. Most refugees hesitated to take up the Soviet offer for many reasons: they preferred not to close off other, more attractive havens; they did not want to lose their Polish citizenship and leave loved ones behind; or they hoped to leave the USSR if that later became an option. Because the national identity was strong among these Jews, and their culture differed from that of their Soviet Jewish brethren—they had their own political parties, spoke Yiddish, and were more urban—they were not inclined to assimilate.30 Quite a few of them returned to German-occupied Poland where, of course, they were killed. In all, some 250,000 Jews from the German-annexed territories fled to the interior or were inadvertently saved from Nazi annihilation by being deported to Siberia or Central Asia. Furthermore, the Soviets helped evacuate Jews (including those from Vilnius) and other nationalities caught in the Nazi onslaught at the final disposition of the Polish territories on 28 September 1939. The Israeli historian Dov Levin believes that the deportations were “the dénouement of a lengthy series of Soviet attempts to solve the refugee problem in a constructive and humane fashion, at least in Soviet terms of the time.”31 Be that as it may, the plans were insufficiently concerned with the special needs of Jewish refugees, if they consid-

the soviet union, the holocaust, and auschwitz 39

ered them at all. In this strange, if not bizarre, way, including forced exile to Siberia and Central Asia, the Soviet authorities ended up saving thousands of Jews from the Nazi juggernaut. Therefore, the difficulties facing the fleeing Jews cannot be seen as the outcome of consistently hostile policies or deliberate discrimination. Many scholars have remarked that after the signing of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact in August 1939, Soviet propaganda became silent about Nazi persecution of the Jews. But was it this silence that explains the unwillingness of the Jews to evacuate the Nazi-occupied territory for the east? The evidence suggests that changes in Soviet propaganda were not the main reason. Those caught in the Nazi net knew of the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich, but the violent outbursts there had not been systematic, certainly not exterminatory. By the time the Nazi invasion came and the large-scale killing began, it was too late. Also lulling the Jews were memories of the benign German occupation of 1918, when the German authorities had put an end to pogroms in the Russian areas they occupied. That earlier memory translated into the belief among some Jews that life would be better under the Germans than under the Soviets. If the Jews in the German zone did not flee, it was not entirely due to a lack of information but also because, especially in the midst of a frantic situation, they could not believe or comprehend what was happening. (They were far from alone in that disbelief.) Besides, evacuation to the Soviet Union was not an attractive choice, for it meant grueling labor, the loss of freedom of movement and of a chance for an evacuation permit, and the abandonment of one’s apartment and material goods in the midst of winter. Soviet reality was hardly the promised land in the eyes of the numerous inhabitants of the occupied region. Its depressed economy, ban on political activity, required work on the Sabbath, and prohibitions against the Jewish community’s organizations and press—all in addition to the “normal” discrimination against Jews—weighed heavily in the decision not to accept the Soviet offer.32 Despite these shortcomings, the Jews of eastern Poland had good reason to regard the Red Army as liberators, given the Nazi noose hanging over their heads. For them, the Russians were the lesser of two evils, or, as the saying went, “better Stalin than Hitler.” In the first few weeks of the Soviet army’s presence, Jews understandably tended to interpret things in the most favorable light. After all, the Party’s official policy was to crack down on antisemitism, punish vandals, and execute some who killed Jews, while dispelling rumors of Jewish misdeeds and slanders against Christians. Consequently, Jews paid less attention to concomitant Soviet attacks on “Jewish chauvinism,” “counterrevolutionary” parties like the Bund, Jewish bourgeois nation-

40  harvey asher

alism, and so on.33 While the Jews looked favorably on the Soviet occupation, the rest of the indigenous population regarded the Soviets as invaders, so the Jews’ discordant response augmented their already unfavorable image among their neighbors. After 1 November 1940, the frontier was officially sealed, though in practice it remained porous. In a hit-or-miss fashion, Soviet border guards let in some refugees and pushed back others. Nonetheless, Soviet policy now was mainly to crack down on the flow of Jews to their areas of control. By May 1940, the local Soviet press began to run articles referring to the refugees as shirkers and black marketeers, and they were rounded up and shifted to the interior. Georgii Fedorovich Aleksandrov, the head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop), criticized Jewish predominance in several cultural establishments; and they were called “national nihilists” and “destroyers of Russian cultural values,” anticipating the party line of the late 1940s.34 The Soviet authorities issued no further statements on the mass exiles. In 1940, the Nazis’ Reich Office for the Emigration of the Jews, which was run by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, proposed to ship approximately 350,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union, plus an additional 1,800,000 living in Reich-annexed territory, including the General Government in Poland. The proposal suggests that the Nazis did not yet envisage a Final Solution in 1940 but also that the Soviet refusal to accept these Jews, although they were aware of their tragic plight in Poland, indirectly led the Germans to search for other ways to get rid of them.35 Altman and Ingerflom argue that the Soviet rejection was based on fear of a fifth column. Paradoxically, after tortuous diplomacy a small number of Jews who had made it to Vladivostok were given Japanese “Sugihara visas” that allowed them passage to safe sanctuaries—mostly to Kobe, Japan.36 The German invasion of the Soviet Union led to the occupation of Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic republics, the North Caucasus, and a large area of European Russia; these territories had a combined prewar population of 85,000,000, about 45 percent of the total Soviet population. From the first days of the invasion, the Sovinformbiuro broadcast and printed information about the persecutions against the Jews; the first communication on 26 June announced the pogrom at Białystok. The head of the Party in Belorussia, Panteleimon Kondrat´evich Ponomarenko, told Stalin that “the Jews terrorized by Hitler fled like beasts instead of fighting.”37 He indicated that Nazi propaganda used the words “Yid” and “Communist” synonymously, but that the Belorussian population rejected this type of propaganda. He did not, however, mention that the German military occupation au-

the soviet union, the holocaust, and auschwitz 41

thorities sponsored between 200 and 400 local periodicals and newspapers whose reporting depicted the Jews as the main enemy. These reports led to neighbors closing their doors to Jews; they did not do this out of fear alone, for the same people did help non-Jewish prisoners of war, which was also punishable by death.38 In his report of 19 August, Ponomarenko no longer accused the Jews of fleeing, instead describing the massacres and brutalities perpetrated by the Nazis throughout Belorussia. He also reaffirmed that Nazi propaganda had not won over the republic’s population. More significantly, Soviet republican NKVD branches gathered information on the deaths of Jewish prisoners of war and the Jewish population, which Stalin read. In late August 1941, a number of leading Soviet Jewish luminaries spoke of the Nazi plans to exterminate the entire Jewish people and other “inferior” peoples, joining other media groups that appealed to the Soviet population to fight actively against the Nazi occupiers. This information helped more than 54 percent of the Jewish inhabitants of prewar Poland to escape to the east by year’s end; overall, Jews constituted one-fourth of all the evacuees from Poland to the USSR.39 Large numbers of Moscow and Leningrad Jews were also evacuated. When the German invasion began, the Soviets reversed their earlier policy of permitting Jews and others to flee and henceforth refused to allow those now under attack from the Nazis to leave Soviet-annexed Poland and head east. The Red Army and border guards stopped anyone, not only Jews, who lacked an official evacuation document, thereby causing thousands (many of them Jews) to fall into Nazi hands. The Party gave no official order to provide help to the victims—for example, by raising the quota limitations. This Soviet inaction or indifference stands in contrast to earlier help rendered and suggests an inconsistent, if not contradictory, policy toward both Jewish and non-Jewish refugees. Altman and Ingerflom wonder whether this resulted from the Kremlin’s desire not to validate Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda or from the Party’s own internationalist creed of not distinguishing among victims by nationality. Both factors, they argue, probably contributed to the decision.40 Despite the chaos and disorganization of the early days following the invasion, a more generous Soviet policy could have saved thousands of lives. In a speech on 7 November 1941, Stalin for the first and last time specifically mentioned Jews among a host of other victims of Nazism. In this speech one already finds the thesis that the Nazi invasion brought suffering and death to all the Soviet people, a theme subsequently reiterated in several addresses by Foreign Minister Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov.41 The leitmotif of Stalin’s statements on this subject from 1942 to 1945 is that the

42  harvey asher

Nazis sought to annihilate the Slavic people. Still, despite Stalin’s subsequent silence, on 20 December 1941 the state newspaper Izvestiia published a communiqué specifically on the extermination of the Soviet Jews. The report indicates that the Kremlin knew of the systematic killing that began immediately after the onset of the Nazi occupation—how the Jews were rounded up, transferred to camps, and killed in brutal ways, especially children. Death tolls for specific massacres were provided, though they were not always accurate.42 Strangely, the article made no mention of the ghettos, about which information was available. On the whole, the report stressed death figures but did not appeal for action, perhaps because the German occupiers would have responded to such an exhortation by killing the non-Jewish population. Among the Stavka documents kept in the Russian Federation Archives, Altman found a typed, four-page report based on data from partisans on the massacre of the Jews, dated 16 January 1943. It provided figures on Jewish deaths in five occupied Soviet republics. Despite its late publication, Altman claims the report persuaded some of the surviving Jews to flee to the forests. Still, no order was given to the partisans and local population to help them there or in the concentration camps or ghettos.43 The documents apparently had little influence on local partisan leaders because they supposedly feared that spies among the ghetto dwellers might infiltrate partisan units, and because some of them were antisemites. Even if they had wished, it would have been well-nigh impossible for partisan units to integrate entire Jewish families into their mobile, high-risk operations.44 After the victory at Stalingrad, Soviet leaders reduced official communiqués to a minimum, though there does not seem to have been an all-encompassing written or oral order imposing an information blackout on the extermination of the Jews.45 In a February 1944 memo, however, Aleksandrov, the head of Agitprop, replaced (with the approval of higher-ups) the word “Jews” with the phrase “peaceful Soviet citizens” as the label for all Soviet subjects who had been annihilated by the Nazis. The Jews were henceforth to be treated as part of this larger category, not as a separate group of victims.46 Moreover, at the liberation of Auschwitz, no mention was made of the victims’ origins in Pravda articles on the subject. (It may be remembered that Franklin Roosevelt likewise usually referred to the Jewish victims as political refugees.) As General Petrenko tells us, however, the Jews were specifically mentioned in the reports of the army’s political organs between 26 and 31 January. These reports were then “corrected” by higher military authorities, so the final document submitted to the State Committee on Defense (headed by Stalin) included no references to the Jews.47 The alteration suggests that the

the soviet union, the holocaust, and auschwitz 43

military leaders at the front understood the new party line. The final draft also lowered the estimated death toll among Soviet Jews, thereby deflecting attention from the fact that the liberation of Auschwitz had not been among the objectives of the Vistula-Oder offensive. Because the final text did list the names of those killed, making it easy to recognize their Jewish origins, the alteration seems to have been intended less to obscure their ancestry than to deny them separate status. During the war, republican NKVD units took note of manifestations of antisemitism among the Soviet intelligentsia, such as the belief that Jews dominated Soviet culture. Nonetheless, as we have seen, Stalin initiated no antisemitic edicts or actions during the war years. Antisemitism, then, does not seem to have been the primary reason for the habitual official silence on the particulars of the destruction of Soviet Jewry. A better explanation is that the Kremlin’s attitude toward the Jews was not independent of its national policy more generally. This policy emphasized the traditions of the Russian army and Russian patriotism as the best means to combat Nazi propaganda while maintaining the morale of the population and the army. Given these objectives, what was to be gained by emphasizing the Jews’ situation? Also, by the time the fortunes of the Soviet army improved, most of Soviet Jewry had already perished. Pragmatically speaking, to share this information with the Russian people retrospectively would have been of little military or propaganda value to the regime. To single out the plight of the Jews might also have suggested analogies between the Nazi deportation of the Jews and Soviet transfers of entire nationalities, such as the Chechens and Volga Germans.48 Kremlin leaders probably wished to avoid validating the Nazis’ claim that they were targeting only Jews and Communists, particularly in regions where antisemitism seemed to be on the increase in the second phase of the war.49 (Similar considerations inhibited the other Allies from portraying the war as a fight to save the Jews.) The analysis by Altman and Ingerflom has several strengths. It shows the shifts in Soviet policy and connects them to specific periods, from the events leading up to the war to the different phases of the conflict and, in less depth, the postwar and contemporary scene in Russia. The authors have unearthed archival documents that dent, if not pierce, the armor protecting the widely held view that Soviet policies either ignored or exacerbated the plight of Soviet Jews during the Holocaust. What transpired, the two authors demonstrate, was more complicated than Stalin simply acting out his psychopathic antisemitism by issuing a spate of anti-Jewish orders. At times, however, the authors seem to use exceptions to prove the rule. Some of their generalizations are too sweeping—because the silence was bro-

44  harvey asher

ken on occasion does not mean that it was not prevalent or the best indicator of Soviet policy. The bottom line remains that, whatever the exceptions and whatever the regime’s motivations, much of its conduct had a negative impact on the Jews’ survival: “Neither from the Soviet state nor from the Party was there a single appeal to underground organizations or the local population to help Soviet Jews.”50 The authors point out several instances when a more generous policy could have saved thousands of additional Jewish lives. Whatever the horrors perpetrated against countless innocent Soviet citizens by the Nazis, the situation of the Jews was peculiar: only they were singled out for total extermination—every last man, woman, and child. The authors understate the role of visceral antisemitism in shaping Soviet Jewish policies, even if this is hard to prove conclusively. Given the long history of official and popular antisemitism in the Russian empire—the pogroms, the Pale of Settlement, economic discrimination, education quotas, religious discrimination, forced assimilation, state encouragement of antisemitism, the Black Hundreds, the mass slaughter of Jews during the Civil War, the circulation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—it is difficult to dismiss the notion that a culture of antisemitism helped shape the behavior of the Soviet government and the Communist Party during the Holocaust. Expediency certainly played a role, as did the disorganization and outright chaos that reigned in the often desperate military situation before the tide of battle turned, but the importance of contingency should not obscure the role of antisemitism in the Soviet policy of denying the Jews separate nationality status and insisting on their assimilation into the general population. (The creation in the Far East in 1928 of Birobidzhan, also known as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, is the lone exception to the rule.) I would also stress (more than do Altman and Ingerflom) how the nature of the Soviet system affected the way Soviet help to the Jews was dispensed. Stalin’s Russia was not noted for humanism and compassion. Soviet practices that might strike the Westerner as harsh—we will allow you to enter the country, even help you move, but only if you become Soviet citizens willing to perform hard labor in remote areas—were actually generous by the Soviet Union’s own contemporary standards, especially given the alternatives that Jews faced. Soviet heavy-handedness was dispensed ecumenically to all subject peoples: entire nationalities—Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Meskhetian Turks, Ingush—were torn from their homelands and deported to remote regions of the country, condemned as collectively guilty of real or imagined offenses against the motherland, not to mention the horrors perpetrated on its Gulag population. Why expect Soviet treatment of the Jews to be qualitatively different?

the soviet union, the holocaust, and auschwitz 45

As noted earlier, Soviet behavior should be approached from a comparative perspective: what could the other members of the anti-Nazi coalition have done to save more Jews? My own view is that much more could have been done, including the expansion of quotas when immigration was still possible, greater news coverage of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews from 1933 on, and threats of retribution if they did not halt the Final Solution. That this did not happen in the USSR was not, I think, primarily due to antisemitism, though its existence there (as in a number of Western democracies) likely contributed to the decision not to devote more resources to helping the Jews. Broader considerations also dominated the deliberations of the Nazis’ enemies, however, particularly the sincere belief that the best way to save the Jews was to defeat the Nazis and their allies as quickly as possible. The decision not to make saving the Jews a priority can be viewed as sensible or even necessary, given the many variables involved, including what was known about the Jewish situation. These factors led the Allies to conclude that the best way to save the Jews was to win the war. Sadly, the plight of the Jews was not deemed worthy of priority status by anyone except the Nazis and their opportunistic cohorts. The real question, then, is not why the Allies did not do more, but why they should have considered it urgent at all to end the Nazi war against the Jews. Given the major powers’ reluctance to intervene in earlier (Armenian) and post-Holocaust genocides, and the fact that their own Jews had little value as political capital or even constituted a liability, why expect the Nazi Holocaust to prompt a more dramatic intervention?51 Nowhere are the inconsistencies of Soviet Holocaust policy more apparent than in the checkered history of the publication of the Black Book.52 Toward the end of the war, party authorities seemed to be on the verge of approving the publication of a Black Book containing graphic accounts by victims, friends of victims, on-the-spot observers, and perpetrators of the atrocities committed only against the Jews between 1941 and 1945. The idea for such a book originated in the United States at the end of 1942, when Albert Einstein, the writer Shalom Asch, and the journalist Ben Zion Goldberg sent a telegram to the newly formed Soviet Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC) that proposed a joint publication with the World Jewish Congress in New York and the Jewish National Council of Palestine (Va’ad Leumi). The JAC was headed by the renowned Jewish actor Solomon Mikhailovich Mikhoels but was subordinate to the Sovinformbiuro. The committee prepared tens of thousands of documents on the genocide and Jewish participation in combat. The goal was to rally Western support for the Soviet military effort by encouraging the opening of a second front and to undermine the image of

46  harvey asher

Jewish cowardice. According to Leonid Liuks, more than Nazi propaganda was behind the surge in popular antisemitism that occurred even in the areas the Germans did not occupy, principally because it was believed that the Jews had fled from the front.53 Ultimately, the JAC hoped to publish a Black Book dealing with the extermination of Soviet Jews and the attitude of the Soviet population. The resulting Black Book was to be published simultaneously in English in the United States, in Yiddish and Russian in the Soviet Union, and in Hebrew in Palestine. Mikhoels and the JAC’s executive secretary, Shakhno Epshtein, recommended to Agitprop official Aleksandr Sergeevich Shcherbakov that the U.S. proposal be accepted. When Mikhoels, the poet Isaak Solomonovich “Itzik” Fefer, and other members of the JAC board visited the United States in 1943 to appeal for Jewish support for the Soviet war effort, they met with Goldberg, after which they wired Lozovskii, head of the Sovinformbiuro and party representative on the JAC board, for permission to negotiate. On 27 July 1943, the Yiddish newspaper Eynikayt (Unity) indicated that agreement had been reached and called for those who had materials on Nazi crimes against the Jews to send them to the JAC. While the JAC appointed an editorial board primarily composed of Yiddish-language writers, the widely read wartime journalist Ilya Ehrenburg (Il´ia Erenburg) chaired a second board consisting mostly of Russian writers. The JAC believed that the Black Book should include accounts of Nazi atrocities in all of occupied Europe, while Ehrenburg believed it should focus on occupied Soviet territory. The dispute was resolved, at least temporarily, when the JAC agreed to a Russian edition for Soviet readers as well as a joint Black Book for foreign readers. In April 1944, Ehrenburg, who had for a long time been gathering material on the murder of Jews in Soviet territory, was allowed to publish a small volume of this material in Merder fun Felker (Murderers of People); a second, larger volume came out in 1945. Clearly, the authorities were not eager to have the material published in Russian for a wider readership of Soviet Jews and non-Jews.54 The JAC was most unhappy with Ehrenburg’s decision to act alone. When the American edition of the Black Book (ABB) was ready to go to press in the second half of 1945, the JAC demanded the excision of Albert Einstein’s introduction, which singled out Jewish suffering. It also called for cutting the first chapter for its statement that “the destruction of Jews was nothing new, it had been going on for 2,000 years, and the Germans had only continued it.”55 This implied that the Soviet Union was one of those places where destructive antisemitism had long persisted. The introduction was also

the soviet union, the holocaust, and auschwitz 47

considered too Zionist, an outlook at odds with the party line that promoted the merger of the Jews with the surrounding Soviet population as the proper way to resolve the “Jewish question.” Moreover, the ABB said, “we must speak of the Germans as a whole and not purely the Nazis,” which the Soviet regime found awkward now that it acknowledged the existence of “good” Germans in the Reich territory it had occupied.56 The Soviet hesitancy about publishing the Black Book also derived in part from the book’s emphasis on acts of Jewish heroism and resistance against the Nazis.57 Because the JAC thought the ABB dealt too much with places outside the Soviet Union, it suggested that a second volume be prepared in the Soviet Union to fill the gap. The situation was fluid enough in 1945 to anticipate that both volumes would see the light of day in the Soviet Union. This was not to be. Methodological and personal disputes persisted between Ehrenburg’s Literary Commission and the JAC board. Despite the difficulties, separate manuscripts were submitted to a special commission appointed by Lozovskii, which concluded that the Ehrenburg material could be published only as separate pamphlets. The JAC was told that, after revisions, its material would be of some value for the Black Book, but in its present form it was not sufficient.58 Unhappy with the decision, Ehrenburg resigned, and on 28 May 1945 the Sovinformbiuro established a new Black Book editorial board chaired by the writer Vasilii Semenovich Grossman. A revised manuscript in Russian (henceforth cited as RBBM) devoted less attention to the role of Ukrainian auxiliaries, and the history of the Judenräte was not always portrayed as heroic.59 The revised manuscript, after approval by the censorship agency Glavlit, was sent to Der Emes, the Yiddish publishing house, for publication. There was every indication that the RBBM, edited by Grossman, would come out in 1946. (Parts of the manuscript were published in Romanian, and typed copies were sent to Jewish organizations in the United States, Palestine, Great Britain, and five other countries).60 It was not, however, published in the Soviet Union. That failure led Mikhoels to appeal to Central Committee Secretary Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov for help on 28 November 1946. Zhdanov forwarded Mikhoels’s letter to Aleksandrov, who responded negatively on 3 February 1947, noting that “running through the whole book is the idea that the Germans plundered and murdered Jews only.”61 In August, Glavlit stopped the presses after most of the typesheets had already been printed. On 18 September 1947, Mikhoels again appealed to Zhdanov. The secretary sent the second appeal to Agitprop, on which Mikhail Andreevich Suslov had replaced the Sovinformbiuro as overseer of the JAC. Speaking for Molotov, M. A. Morozov, head of Agitprop’s Publishing Department, sent to Zhdanov “reference no. 76467,”

48  harvey asher

which concluded that the Black Book contained serious errors and could not be published.62 A final appeal from Feffer to print a limited number of copies for deposit in the closed sections of some libraries also fell on deaf ears.63 All copies of the manuscript, including the printing plates prepared for publication, were destroyed in 1948. The story of the failed publication of the Black Book reflects the same kind of inconsistency present in Soviet policies toward the Holocaust during the war. In both cases, there was a gradual movement away from recognizing the special situation of the Jews to denying it altogether. In both cases, there was a concern that Judaizing the Holocaust might weaken the sense of unity and resolve that the invasion had created among the Soviet people.64 There was also a desire not to offend certain Soviet nationalities, some of whose members had collaborated with the Nazis and were usually described as “police” in the Black Book. In Berdichev (Berdychiv), for example, “not only the Germans but the police, abetted by members of the ‘Black Hundreds,’ participated in these searches.”65 There does not appear to have been a “smoking gun” linked to Stalin, an order saying “don’t mention the Jews or publish the Black Book.” Instead, party underlings made these decisions, presumably confident that they were carrying out Stalin’s wishes. They navigated the twists and turns of a Stalinist atmosphere in which political defensiveness understandably became the modus operandi. The Soviets had no desire to raise Jewish consciousness, as the policy of recognizing their “specialness” and some of the content of the Black Book had the potential to do. Moreover, as the military situation improved, there was less need for Jewish help from abroad, so the value of both the publication and its JAC sponsors diminished. Both were wartime anomalies, tolerated largely because the desperation of the Soviets’ military situation outweighed ideological reservations. Despite its cooperation with party policy, the JAC was always kept on a short leash. The regime was never happy with a central organization that represented all Jews irrespective of their political beliefs and endeavored to deal on its own with manifestations of Soviet antisemitism and the future of Soviet Jewry in the postwar world.66 Despite the JAC’s efforts to walk a tightrope in complying with the Party’s sometimes bewildering policy shifts—for example, supporting the state of Israel while opposing a pro-Israeli attitude among Soviet Jews—by 1947, Stalin was already using Central Committee Secretary Georgii Maksimilianovich Malenkov and party ideologist Suslov to close down the JAC.67 It is no coincidence that in 1948, when the typeset plates of the 1946 Black Book were destroyed, the JAC was terminated. By the end of the war, the huge numbers of non-Jewish deaths made the contrast between Jewish and non-Jewish fatalities less sharp in the So-

the soviet union, the holocaust, and auschwitz 49

viet Union than in other countries overrun by the Nazis.68 Conceding the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust immediately following the war would have jeopardized the Party’s efforts to strengthen its own legitimacy by highlighting the war as an experience shared by the entire country. In addition, despite editing by party committees, the Black Book still contained material showing that not all Russians had been united against the Nazis, despite its mostly favorable references to the Soviet people who risked their lives to save Jews.69 The decision not to publish, then, reflected larger concerns: reducing the visibility of the Jews in the story of the Great Patriotic War, the changed policy toward the new East Germany, the anticosmopolitan (anti-Jewish) campaign that formed a response to the developing Cold War, and equating Zionism with fascism. To these considerations must be added others stemming from the murder of most members of the JAC. Finally, the Black Book also contained negative references to the evolving “People’s Democracies,” such as the Romanians who in Odessa began to rape girls and “ripped . . . babies in half,” or “certain Polish riffraff” in Białystok who set on “defenseless and persecuted Jews.”70 At a minimum, then, the suppression of the Black Book provided an implicit message of how Soviet domestic and foreign policies were evolving. ----In post-Soviet Russia and the newly independent states, glasnost has made possible reappraisals of the Holocaust. A Holocaust Foundation was established in Moscow in 1991, and largely thanks to the efforts of its director, Ilya Altman, there have been conferences and symposia in Moscow and abroad, attended by both foreign scholars and scholars from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). By 1999, the Holocaust Foundation had a membership of about 200 professional historians, journalists, and others, with branches in 12 cities in Russia and Belarus. It has published more than 100 articles on Holocaust-related topics, worked with Yad Vashem, and produced a ten-book series, the Russian Holocaust Library, which includes study aids for teachers and students. It also conducts seminars for teachers from the CIS and from Jewish schools, and has occasionally published conference proceedings, including Ten´ kholokosta, which contains manuscripts from the Second International Symposium in Moscow in 1998 on “Lessons of the Holocaust and Contemporary Russia.” Besides scholarly presentations on the treatment of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and in the post-Soviet situation, other Holocaust Foundation goals include the development of educational strategies for promoting the study of the Holocaust in the curricula of Russian secondary schools and institutions of higher learning. The founda-

50  harvey asher

tion works hard, in conjunction with the Russian Ministry of Education and the Moscow Department of Education, to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive in Russia and the former Soviet republics.71 Still, it has not been an easy road for the foundation. Obtaining permission to build Holocaust memorials remains difficult. After the war, sites where the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews was known to have taken place were left unmarked. In no city except Minsk was there a memorial with a Yiddish inscription explicitly invoking the Holocaust. Local authorities banned all Jewish symbols in monuments and changed those that had been erected here and there.72 Even the laconic phrase “to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust,” which appeared on a monument in Belorussia, was deemed unacceptable; seven people who proposed a memorial in Odessa were sent to the camps, and the Jewish Museum in Vilnius was closed down.73 Only in 1991 did a national day to commemorate the victims of Babi Yar take place; even today it is not a site much visited or, for that matter, even known to many Ukrainians.74 The effort to add a Holocaust commemoration to the war memorial complex at Poklonnaia Gora in Moscow resulted in a structure that made the reference to the Jews look like an afterthought.75 The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is still not a national holiday in Russia; however, since 1995 it has been celebrated in Moscow at the initiative of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, which since 1992 has also organized a Day of Remembrance. Thus the Soviet-era silence on the topic of the Russian Holocaust is no longer so deafening, but there has been no widespread grappling with wartime events. While antisemitism likely plays some role in the continuing relative silence on the extermination of Soviet Jewry, it remains—as for the earlier postwar period—only a partial explanation. Of course, the Holocaust was not at the center of public discussion in the West after World War II either, whether among the survivors or in the countries involved in the war.76 Despite the important efforts of Altman and his colleagues, one might hazard a guess that as memories of the Great Patriotic War fade from public memory—Russian war veterans complain about their shabby treatment in the new Russia—the population will be less willing to reengage the subject of the Russian Holocaust. Young Russians are more concerned with the immediate problems of adjusting to life in the new Russia than with preserving or resurrecting divisive memories. Moreover, for the Jewish population of Russia and the CIS, raising questions of victimization risks arousing the ire of their non-Jewish neighbors. As more Jews leave Russia and the CIS, it is unlikely that those who remain will have the clout or desire to devote their energies to the subject of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union.77

4

Patterns of Violence



The Local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July–August 1941



Vladimir Solonari

A

mong historians there has been growing interest in the question of popular participation in the Holocaust of European Jews, particularly in the territories to the east of the Soviet Union’s 1941 western border.1 Many factors have contributed to this avalanche of high-quality scholarly texts— among them the opening of the archives after the fall of communism, the centrality of a particular ethnic group’s complicity in the mass murder of Jews to the perception and self-perception of the respective nations, and the incessant public demand for works that deal with these kinds of emotionally charged issues. Although scholars research events that occurred in different places and under substantially different circumstances, they address a number of problems that are to some extent similar, among them the role of traditional antisemitism in determining popular participation in the murder of Jews, the extent to which the experience of the Soviet occupation framed the perception of Jews as Communists and enemies of the local gentiles, and finally the influence the Germans and their allies exerted on the locals’ attitudes toward and treatment of Jews. One small book, Jan Gross’s Neighbors, occupies an especially important place in this recent historiography. The book not only reconstructed one especially horrid episode of the mass murder of Jews, in which the participation of local gentiles (Poles) was truly massive, but made, in a manner which is both subtle and radical, a number of general theoretical suggestions. Gross’s rendering of the Jedwabne story as the one in which “half of the 51

52  vladimir solonari

population of a small East European town murdered the other half” is predicated on his intimation that the killers were guided neither by Nazi occupiers’ orders nor, really, by their own resentment against the Jews’ supposedly “treacherous behavior” during the Soviet occupation (which, he insists, was not nearly as massive as the Polish general public and even historians came to believe) but rather by the centuries-long antisemitic tradition in Poland.2 Although Gross does say that the Holocaust has to be accounted for as a “system which functioned according to the preconceived (though constantly evolving) plan,” he expresses his doubts about the tendency in the scholarly literature to read Shoah as a “phenomenon rooted in modernity” and invites us to see it as a “heterogeneous phenomenon,” as “a mosaic composed of discreet episodes, improvised by local decision makers, and hinging on unforced behavior.”3 By invoking the imagery of the Henryk Sienkiewicz national saga of seventeenth-century wars, Trilogy, from the pages of which the murderous peasant mobs appear as if by magic, Gross suggests that the motivations of killers should be sought not in the context of the multiple occupations of 1939–41 and the Nazis’ racial war but in the longue durée of Polish and—more broadly—East European history.4 The immediate debates over Jan Gross’s book tended to focus on what actually happened in Jedwabne and the surrounding areas in July 1941, and among the many merits of such debates is that they helped to clarify with exceptional precision the highly complex and volatile context in which the event took place.5 But the book and the debates it provoked have wider implications for framing the research agenda on the motivation of local non-Nazi killers of Jews in other areas of the Soviet borderlands during World War II. This chapter locates itself within this context of scholarly preoccupations and self-consciously addresses the debates over Gross’s book as especially relevant for the case it studies. The chapter seeks to establish patterns of popular antisemitic violence in the two eastern provinces of Romania, Bessarabia and Bukovina, in July and August 1941 and to explain variations.6 The tragedies in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina took place simultaneously with the Jedwabne slaughter, and the character of the place—the western Soviet borderlands—was also comparable, although, of course, in this case the “land” at the “border” was Romania, not Poland. The killings took place in the first days of the new authorities’ arrival, and thus the behavior of the local gentiles could not have been affected by the experience of their life after “liberation” (by either Germans or Romanians) or by their witnessing wartime barbarities. Instead, both Poles in what was then eastern Poland and Romanians (Moldovans) in eastern Romania endured Soviet occupation—in 1939–41 in the first case and 1940–41 in the second. Given that Soviet policies and behav-

patterns of violence 53

ior in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were quite similar to their policy and behavior in eastern Poland, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that their effects on the worldview and behavior of the local gentiles should have been similar as well. But the structural differences were also substantial. Germans came to eastern Poland as military occupiers and treated local non-Germans as racially inferior; Romanians saw their entry to northern Bukovina and Bessarabia as a return to that part of their national territory of which they were perfidiously deprived by the Soviets in 1940.7 They considered the local Romanian-speaking population (though not local gentile minorities such as Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Gagauzi, and Roma) as members of their nation whom they intended to liberate and protect; and at least part of that population reciprocated, believing this perception was right.8 Returning Romanian officials knew local realities incomparably better than newly arrived Germans did, and they could and did rely on much broader social support than Nazis ever enjoyed. Since this chapter was published in 2007, several first-class studies have appeared that discuss popular antisemitic violence in Axis-occupied East European borderlands. Even a cursory overview of this growing literature is impossible, but one book merits special attention because it summarizes, in a sensible and persuasive manner, scholarship in different languages covering many territories and various cultures and presents a sophisticated interpretation of its topic. Alexander Prusin, while focusing mostly on pre-1939 eastern Poland and the Baltic countries, reaches conclusions close to those expounded in this chapter. My only disagreement with Prusin concerns his failure to explain the qualitative difference between the relations established by the new authorities in Bessarabia and Bukovina with ethnic Romanians and the relations established between occupiers and occupied in other borderlands.9 As I show below, Romanians exercised substantially larger control over antisemitic actions by local populations in the days and weeks right after the occupation than was the case elsewhere. Like Neighbors, this chapter belongs to the genre of microhistory, though unlike Gross’s book it looks closely at what happened not in one locality but in many—namely, everywhere in the rural areas (including smaller townships), since it was there that the killing of Jews was systematic and ubiquitous. The chapter starts by introducing the reader to the local setting and by laying down the main features of Romanian policy in it. It then analyzes the role of local gentiles in the mass murder campaign. The main method of analysis is to compare developments in various localities. This comparison allows a determination of the main forms of local

54  vladimir solonari

reaction and participation in anti-Jewish violence. Here the major defining feature of any particular anti-Jewish episode seems to have been whether the local gentiles intended “just” to plunder and loot Jews’ properties, as well as (occasionally) to humiliate them—a type of violence that is well known from premodern times—or to actually and systematically kill their Jewish neighbors. It is the chapter’s basic assumption that only the second type of episode belongs to the category of “participation in the Holocaust.” Since, as is shown below, cases of both types of antisemitic popular violence can be established in the provinces, the next question is: what circumstances usually gave rise to the second type of violence rather than the first? Variations in gentiles’ behavior can be explained by looking closely at their motives, as reflected in the proceedings of the postwar trials and, to a lesser degree, the findings of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR, henceforth called the Extraordinary State Commission. Finally, clarification of the killers’ motivations leads to the determination of the ideal types of killers and thus to the interpretation of the patterns of popular violence. This research is based on a careful reading of a wide variety of sources, but primarily postwar trial records in the Soviet Union and the records of the Extraordinary State Commission.10 I am acutely aware of the difficulties involved in the use of communist-era trial files for the study of what actually happened on the spot. For the purposes of this chapter, Soviet trials, and especially those held in Soviet Moldavia and Ukraine, were more important than Romanian ones, since they dealt with the crimes perpetrated by the local residents of the areas under investigation, rather than the crimes of the Romanian military and gendarmes, which were the subject of Romanian jurisprudence. The majority of files used come from the 1944–49 period, with far fewer from the early to mid-1950s (the latest record is from 1955). Soviet investigations were often superficial and biased; minutes were kept in an untidy manner and quite frequently doctored by the interrogators—for example, to insert in the defendants’ speech such Soviet formulas as “leader of the peoples” instead of “Stalin,” or “Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality” instead of “Jews.” Although the quality of investigation and records tended to improve with time, the memory of eyewitnesses tended to fade, so that, as a general rule, the earlier the file, the more informative it is likely to be. After a careful reading of a large number of files, one can discriminate fairly easily between the instances of “Soviet speak” as quoted above and plausible details of lo-

patterns of violence 55

cal life and death, such as the pillows that a killer brought from the killing site, a particular phrase that a Jew said before the execution of himself and his family, or what a perpetrator retorted to his neighbor when the latter rebuked him for his cruelty. It is highly unlikely that investigators would invent those details, as they did when they pretended that their clients used “Soviet speak”: from their perspective, there was no need to do so. Obviously, the plausibility of the accounts increases if the same detail is repeated by several witnesses, even if (or perhaps especially) in slightly different variations. It is these small details—one is tempted to say “slips of the tongue”—that sometimes can supply invaluable evidence as to the circumstances of cleansing operations and the motivations of killers. Romanian trial records were kept in a less loaded language and, because they were transcribed in the native tongue of the defendants and witnesses— not translated, as was often the case in Soviet Moldavia and Ukraine—probably contain fewer factual mistakes than the Soviet ones. But in Romania no actual minutes of the interrogations were kept, however imperfectly. Rather, the defendants and witnesses were asked to sign written declarations, which were prepared for them by the investigators or their secretaries, which makes it less likely that details that could be considered unimportant by the investigators but would be invaluable for contemporary historians seeped into the archived material. The Extraordinary State Commission documents are also a problematic source. The commission’s work, undertaken in 1944–45, was very uneven: in some districts it worked thoroughly, in others less so. Sometimes it could rely on relatively qualified personnel, but quite often barely literate party activists performed the entire task. Sometimes the commissioners could count on the cooperation of the locals; sometimes, as in the mountainous areas of Bukovina, where military actions against Ukrainian nationalist guerillas were going on at the time, it could not. As in the case of the Soviet trial files, and possibly even more so, the commissioners used a politically and ideologically loaded language, which in some instances makes their records barely comprehensible. In other cases, however, they would collect handwritten accounts of the survivors or eyewitnesses and attach them to their minutes or would transcribe verbal testimony that contained vivid descriptions of the killing operations. Still, the use of a fairly large quantity of records frequently makes it possible to sift more credible reports from less convincing ones. All in all, it is safe to claim that the use of this mass of material—about 60 Soviet files, about 30 Romanian ones, and thousands of pages of records of the Extraordinary State Commission—even allowing for various incongruities,

56  vladimir solonari

imprecisions, and distortions—permits one to reconstruct the patterns of behavior, as opposed to the circumstances of every particular case, with a fair degree of certainty. This chapter also employs a large collection of testimonies of Jewish survivors (900 items), which were gathered by the Jewish community in the city of Chernivtsy (Cerninăuţi in Romanian) in the eponymous region of Ukraine from the residents of that city in the early 1990s.11 Unsurprisingly, few of the survivors witnessed actual killings. Mostly they describe their suffering in the Cerninăuţi ghetto or in transit and concentration camps in Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria.

The Logistics of Mass Murder In the interwar period, Bessarabia and Bukovina were part of Greater Romania as it emerged after World War I. In late June and early July 1940, in accordance with a secret understanding with Nazi Germany, the USSR seized Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania, which was forced to cede the provinces unconditionally. The next year, the Soviets carried out forcible Sovietization, including arrests, deportations, and confiscations. In July–August 1941, Romania, in alliance with Nazi Germany, which it joined in attacking the Soviet Union, returned to the two provinces and reestablished its administration there. This situation lasted until the Red Army’s return in the spring and summer of 1944. While returning in the summer of 1941, the Romanian troops, gendarmerie, and police, in collaboration with local gentiles, engaged in a campaign of indiscriminate violence against the Jews. According to the most authoritative but still only approximate estimate, between 45,000 and 60,000 Jews perished in this wave of terror. In the fall of the same year, more than 90,000 surviving Jews from Bukovina and 56,000 from Bessarabia were deported to the southeastern region of Ukraine, lying between the Dniester and South Bug rivers, where they were placed in concentration camps and ghettos.12 The decision to cleanse the provinces of Jews was made at the top of the Romanian governmental pyramid—undoubtedly by the Romanian dictator in 1940–44, General (from 22 August 1941, Marshal) Ion Antonescu himself—on the eve of the German-Romanian invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. The decision was announced to the government by the dictator’s most trusted lieutenant and distant relative, Vice Chairman of the Council of Ministers Mihai Antonescu, on 17 June 1941.13 By any standard, cleansing the two provinces of Jews presented a huge logistical problem. According to official Romanian assessments, in 1940 about 207,000 Jews lived in Bessarabia and about 70,000 in northern Bukovina.14

patterns of violence 57

Their numbers could not have changed substantially by 1941.15 To kill or detain and deport all those people was a gigantic task, especially in time of war and in the immediate vicinity of the front line. The Romanian army and gendarmerie played the decisive role in the mass killing of Jews in these two provinces.16 The army had strong antisemitic traditions and thirsted for revenge against the Jews of these provinces due to its chaotic withdrawal in late June and early July 1940. At that time, according to the widespread perception of the Romanian military, Jews in the provinces massively demonstrated their support for the invading Soviets and a lack of loyalty to the Romanian state.17 On 30 June 1941, just two days before the German breakthrough in northern Bessarabia, leading to the Soviet retreat and the Romanian and German entry into the provinces, Ion Antonescu issued oral instructions to the commanders of the “large units” (regiment and up), which effectively incited the military to kill Jews: Enemy agents work behind the front lines attempting to commit acts of sabotage, giving the enemy signals or supplying him with the information and even assaulting isolated soldiers. The Jewish population participates in this activity. General Antonescu . . . has ordered that all those who act in any way against the army and against the interests of the nation be executed on the spot.18

Following this order, many in the Romanian military, both among the lower and higher ranks, engaged in the indiscriminate killings of Jewish civilians in the provinces. To give just one example, on 8 July 1941, the Thirteenth Regiment of Mountain Troops (Vânători de munte) entered the village of Cupca (Kupka) in northern Bukovina; immediately, its commander, Colonel Justin Marinoiu, ordered that all Jews be detained and shot. He insisted on the same treatment for Jews in the nearby villages of Serata, Adîncata, and Chelmeneţ. As his subordinate Colonel Ernest Albustin testified in the postwar trial, Marinoiu had no order to proceed in this manner and acted on his own initiative. Everywhere, Jews were accused of attacking Romanian troops from behind, but in reality they were killed as Jews.19 Still, the bulk of the dirty work was done not by army vigilantes and volunteers but by specially created death squads (echipe de execuţii). Newly available archival materials allow one to trace the creation and application of this mechanism of systematic murder in one military unit, the Seventh Cavalry Regiment from the Fifth Cavalry Division, which fought in northern Bessarabia in June–July 1941.20 In early July 1941, immediately after crossing the Prut River, the regiment’s commander, Colonel Gheorghe Carp, sum-

58  vladimir solonari

moned all officers and gave them an order to form death squads from among noncommissioned officers (NCOs) to “cleanse the localities” through which the regiment would pass “of Jews and Communists,” killing everybody “from infants in swaddling clothes to old men with white beards.”21 Two death squads were formed the same day, drawing mostly on volunteers but also on the appointment of ordinary soldiers by their superiors.22 The death squads started their slaughter immediately, and their “achievements” were indeed impressive. In Bessarabia alone they killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of civilians—mostly Jews but also those who collaborated with the Soviets in 1940–41—and they continued in the same vein after having crossed the Dniester River. Probably the bloodiest massacre in which they took part was in the Bessarabian town of Edineţ, in which the army and later the gendarmerie executed at least 537 people, almost all of them Jews.23 The gendarmerie played an even larger role in the mass murder of Jews than did the army. The Romanian gendarmerie was a military police entrusted with the preservation of order in rural areas of the country. In times of war, supplementary gendarme battalions were created to serve as the army’s rear guard. On the eve of the war against the USSR, gendarme units were reconstituted to serve in the soon to be “liberated” northern Bukovina and Bessarabia and manned by exactly the same officers and NCOs who had served there before June 1940. During the military operations in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, these units were subordinated to the army, specifically to Grand Pretor (Prosecutor) General Ion. As soon as the provinces were “liberated” and the front moved eastward, the gendarmerie from Bessarabia and Bukovina were resubordinated to Inspector General of the Gendarmerie General Constantin “Pikky” Vasiliu, who simultaneously was deputy minister of internal affairs. In effect, Vasiliu exercised control over those units even when legally he was not their commander.24 It was probably Vasiliu who came up with the idea to recall to the newly liberated provinces the same gendarme officers who had served there before 1940 and were then dispersed throughout the country. The express aim of this decision was to facilitate ethnic and political cleansing: it was believed that these men had the most knowledge of the local population and would be able to tell “traitors” and Jews from loyalists and Christians quickly and easily.25 In the first days of July 1941, General Vasiliu summoned gendarme officers who were to return to southern Bessarabia to the Danubean port of Galaţ, those scheduled to head to central and northern Bessarabia to the town of Roman in the Romanian province of Moldova, and those slated to return to northern Bukovina (as well as part of northern Bessarabia, which

patterns of violence 59

was included in the restored and enlarged province of Bukovina) to the town of Fălticeni in southern Bukovina. Vasiliu attended conferences in all three localities in Galaţ and Roman; and his deputy, General Ioan Topor, who at that time was also pretor general of the army, accompanied him. The generals instructed officers as to their tasks in the soon to be “liberated” provinces. They made it clear that their first priority was to “cleanse the terrain” from Communists (“suspects”) and Jews. Gendarme officers who after the war were interrogated by the investigators of war crimes differed in their depositions as to how explicit Vasiliu and Topor were about what exactly this cleansing action entailed. While some of the gendarmes declared that Vasiliu and Topor made it clear that the gendarmes had to murder Jews and other suspects on the spot, others insisted that the generals ordered Jews and suspects be rounded up and interned in camps and ghettos or sent to the courts martial for further investigation.26 Captain Laurențiu Stino, who offered the most detailed description of the event in Roman, testified that Vasiliu and Topor incited gendarmes “to take revenge” on “their enemies” with Topor explicitly mentioning Jews. When they left, Gendarme Inspector of the Province of Bessarabia Colonel Teodor Meculescu further instructed gendarmes to take “bloody revenge on those who at the time of evacuation of Bessarabia were against [them], being without mercy to all, in particular to Jews, from an infant to an old person.”27 It is very likely that Vasiliu and Topor agreed on the desirability of having as many Jews and other suspects killed in the first days and weeks after the “liberation,” although they were reluctant to issue this blatantly illegal order themselves. This made the ultimate success of the cleansing operation dependent on the willing cooperation of their subordinates. That in Bessarabia things went in complete accord with Vasiliu and Topor’s murderous plan was due to its unrelenting enforcement by Gendarme Inspector Meculescu. Many of his former subordinates testified in the postwar trials to the constant pressure from Meculescu to kill and to his threat to severely punish—to the point of executing—anybody who dared to disobey.28 Meculescu’s labor was not in vain: all over Bessarabia, his men systematically killed Jews for about two months—from early July to late August. In Bukovina, however, things did not go as “smoothly.” There were several reasons for this, of which the most obvious and probably most important was the failure of Meculescu’s counterpart in that province, Colonel Ioan Mânecuţa, to enforce the “cleansing order” as relentlessly as Meculescu had in Bessarabia. Mânecuţa, who did not participate in the Fălticeni conference, received this order from General Topor and then transmitted it to his subor-

60  vladimir solonari

dinates, the commanders of county gendarme legions.29 Mânecuţa, however, did not display any zeal in ensuring its implementation and even distanced himself from it.30 This situation opened the door for all kinds of arbitrary decisions on the part of the gendarmes. As Mânecuţa himself put it, “every gendarme proceeded as his conscience dictated.”31 Thus the actions of the two gendarme legion commanders, Majors Traian Drăgulescu and Gheorghe Berzescu (overseeing Hotin and Storojineţ counties, respectively) were very different. Drăgulescu was not an antisemite. He was happily married to a Jewish woman. But Drăgulescu was also an opportunist and a hypocrite. Fear of losing his job, of not being promoted or—worse—being sent to the front, tormented him. So he resolved to follow Mânecuţa’s lead: he transmitted the order further down the chain of command but then failed to enforce it, leaving whether and how to implement it to the conscience of his men.32 As a result, the gendarmerie’s record in Hotin county was uneven. Whereas in some villages Jews were shot, in others they were detained and deported.33 Major Gheorghe Berzescu also received the order from General Topor to “cleanse the terrain” via Colonel Mânecuţa, as Drăgulescu did, but—unlike Drăgulescu—he refused to transmit it down the line and it had no effect in the territory under his supervision. Indeed, it appears that none of the gendarmes under his command participated in the killing operations in July– August 1941, though they did participate in the arrest and beating of Soviet activists.34 The behavior of Berzescu’s gendarmes contrasts favorably not only with those of Drăgulescu but also with those of Legion Commander Major Constantin Cichendel, who was in charge of the neighboring Cernăuţi county. Extraordinary State Commission records show that in July and August 1941 Cichendel’s men killed dozens, probably hundreds, of Jews and many Soviet activists—although major massacres were perpetrated, as in Storojineţ county, by the Romanian and German armies.35 The divergent record of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, and within various counties of northern Bukovina, prove that the cleansing of those provinces of Jews demanded willingness from the Romanian military commanders and gendarmes to participate in that campaign. Although the initiative and order came from above, mass killings would have never taken place without the enthusiastic support of mid-level military officers and gendarmes. By the same token, for the “cleansing” operation to succeed, massive participation by local gentiles was required. Let us analyze this group’s behavior and motives.

patterns of violence 61

The Jedwabne Model? The main thesis of Jan Gross’s book is that in the Polish village of Jedwabne in July 1941, the gentiles among the populace killed the Jews. They did it willingly, without being forced by the German occupiers: gentile locals organized themselves for the purpose of mass murder and accomplished it without assistance. Whether this description is true or not (and there are those who question some of its aspects), it is instructive to ask whether a “Jedwabnetype” behavior can be discerned among the many atrocities perpetrated by local gentiles against Jews in Bessarabia and Bukovina. Indeed, in the village of Ghirovo in central Bessarabia, and the township of Stăneştii de Jos, in the northernmost strip of Bukovina, events unraveled in a fashion quite similar to what might be called the “Jedwabne model.” On 27 June 1941—that is, even before the German breakthrough and when the outcome of the battle for Bessarabia was not yet clear—a transitional committee of Romanian power was created in Ghirovo, in which a group of locals, later identified as kulaks and former members of the National Christian Party, played a leading role.36 This committee sent its emissaries across the front lines to establish a liaison with the Romanian troops; they returned with an order to arrest all Jews and Communists and with an announcement that a pogrom against Jews was permitted. The pogrom duly followed, and the committee oversaw arrests. Already by 30 June, most Jews and local Soviet activists had been arrested. Germans and Romanians entered the village on 2 or 3 July, and on the same day the detention of Jews and Soviet activists was completed. The next day, all 72 Jews, including 10 local families and an unknown number of Jews from other villages, and 5 Soviet activists were shot on the order of the chief of the gendarme post, Golgojan.37 According to the eyewitnesses, during the six days that elapsed between the Jews’ arrests and their execution, they were guarded by almost the entire village, “today one street, tomorrow another one.”38 Locals were also mobilized to dig a pit, and some of them took part in the execution. Before the execution, the Jews were stripped and their clothing was divided among the villagers. There are no records of any attempts to save Jewish lives or protests against the massacre.39 Eyewitnesses recalled cases of extreme cruelty toward Jews. For example, one eyewitness recalled the execution by somebody called Vasile Mateescu of one Jewish baby who survived the first salvo of the firing squad.40 The Soviets investigated the massacre at Stăneştii de Jos less thoroughly than the one at Ghirovo, but additional information can be gleaned from

62  vladimir solonari

the findings of the Extraordinary State Commission, in the Romanian postwar investigation files, and in a book by Marius Mircu, a Romanian Jewish journalist who in 1945 wrote an astonishingly accurate account of the massacres in northern Bukovina.41 All sources corroborate the following series of events. In early July 1941, after the Soviet withdrawal and before the arrival of Romanian troops, a Ukrainian nationalist committee was formed in the village; it effectively took control of the situation. One of its first acts was to arrest local Jews who were detained in the mayor’s office (primaria in Romanian, sel´skii sovet in Russian) and on the premises of the local sawmill. As one of the accused later related, members of the committee had an order to arrest all Jews and to turn them over to the Romanian troops after they arrived.42 Whether that order envisioned the actual killing of Jews or not, this is exactly what started to happen even before contact with the Romanian army was established. When Romanian troops arrived, a pogrom commenced, and arrests and killings accelerated. Sixty-five Jews were murdered by garroting, beating with clubs, strangulation, and other means. Killings continued until the arrival of the Romanian gendarmes subordinated to Major Berzescu, who immediately ordered them stopped.43 The behavior of local gentiles in Ghirovo and Stăneştii de Jos exhibits several common characteristics. In both instances, the arrests began before the arrival of the Romanian army; local gentiles appeared to have been well organized and determined to cleanse their village of Jews. Hence their massive participation in the arrests and killings and the thoroughness of the cleansing operation: there were no Jewish survivors in Ghirovo; and though there were a few in Stăneştii de Jos, that was clearly not the choice of the local gentiles, who for the most part preferred to have them all killed. A decisive factor in both cases seems to have been the existence in both localities of a core of tightly knit political activists who commanded massive popular support. In the Bessarabian Moldovan village of Ghirovo, there was a group of long-term members of the cuzist party who, long before the outbreak of war, constituted a hotbed of the regional party machinery extending their influence and a network of supporters outside Ghirovo and into nearby localities.44 They were committed antisemites and xenophobes to whom ethnic cleansing, especially the ethnic cleansing of Jews, was an epitome of their political creed. Whether they commanded the overwhelming loyalty of their villagers before the Soviet invasion of 1940 or not, they were certainly quite popular in 1941. In Stăneştii de Jos the core comprised Ukrainian nationalist activists, which appears to have been even better organized and more tightly knit than the ringleaders from Ghirovo (as indicated by their having caches of firearms). Decades of oppression by the Romanians, then the Soviets, and

patterns of violence 63

of exposure to visceral nationalistic propaganda from Galicia transformed them into fierce and fanatical nationalist fighters ready to commit violence on a massive scale. (Many would later leave Bukovina and join the Ukrainian nationalist forces in Reichskomissariat Ukraina.)45 Again, they enjoyed considerable support from the villagers in July 1941. Still, there was one important difference between the bloodbaths: whereas in Ghirovo killers took their orders from the Romanian military and gendarmerie, in Stăneştii de Jos the orders came from elsewhere and gendarmes, rather than encouraging killers, actually stopped them.

Pogroms “Pogrom” is a generic term often used after World War II to describe popular violence against Jews in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina.46 Indeed, in what was then happening in almost all localities of these two provinces, many characteristics of what are usually understood as “pogroms” were discernible: the breakdown of law and order, chaotic mass participation, and the plunder of property compounded by indiscriminate beatings and the occasional killings of victims.47 Everywhere pogroms were preceded by news, brought either by word of mouth or by the advancing Romanian units (usually scouts) that the highest authority allowed inhabitants to commit pogroms against Jews during the next twenty-four hours or three days.48 But the term “pogrom” obscures serious differences in the patterns of popular violence: while in some places pogromists concentrated on plunder and beatings without engaging in systematic murder, in others they systematically and purposefully killed Jews. The first example comes from the township of Sochireni (Sokiriany in Russian and Ukrainian), which in 1941–44 belonged to the province of Bukovina.49 The Sochireni pogrom can be reconstituted with unusual precision because the files of the Extraordinary State Commission contain detailed testimonies of some of the local Jews who experienced those tragic events.50 Romanian scouts entered the town on 8 or 9 July 1941, and the commanding officer delivered a fiery speech against the Bolsheviks and Jews, using as his platform the small tank on which he entered the city. He was followed on this improvised rostrum by a local Christian Orthodox priest who blessed the Romanian army and by a medical attendant, Krokhmaliuk, who spoke in the same vein as the officer. Immediately afterward, gendarmes, who appeared to have arrived together with the military, announced that a pogrom was permitted. Looting and violence ensued and continued for the whole three or four days—rather longer than in other localities.51 In June 1945, Jewish victims recalled these days as a time spent in hell.

64  vladimir solonari

Dr. Landa, a physician from the local hospital, recounted with bitterness and astonishment how people to whom he had never refused medical help—even though they had been unable to pay their fees—broke into his house and robbed him and his family of everything they had, leaving them literally naked. Nobody came to offer help or allowed Landa and his family into his or her house. Not only were Jews robbed of all their possessions (they even had their gold teeth smashed), but young girls were systematically raped both by the local men and by the Romanian military. Given the horrifying accounts of universal cruelty, baseness, and violence, the actual body count is surprisingly low. All in all, 30 people were killed of the approximately 1,200 Jews then in Sochireni.52 Obviously, this particular pogrom was about plunder and personal enrichment, not about systematic killing. As a means of ethnic cleansing, it was extremely inefficient.53 The Soviet Ministry of State Security (MGB, future KGB) investigated the Nepolocăuţi pogrom in November 1944, and as a result, more information is available on that tragedy than on many others.54 The findings of the Extraordinary State Commission contain additional data.55 Here the pogrom and killings of Jews started before the Romanians’ arrival. The violence was triggered by two local Ukrainian peasants who, according to the confession of one of the accused, “organized a group [with the aim] of killing the Jews.”56 The investigators, alerted by this revelation, tried to pursue the tip: they suspected that the group had wider aims besides the murder of Jews and was in fact a nucleus of the Ukrainian nationalist organization. They pressed the issue with every eyewitness and defendant but invariably received a negative answer. The Chekists finally had to give up their quest for the Ukrainian nationalist underground, though one may suspect that they were in fact misled by the villagers. The ringleaders provoked a panic in the village by shouting, “Jews and Bolsheviks are coming to kill Christians.” The pogrom then started. Gentiles broke into the Jews’ houses, plundered their property, beat them severely, and robbed them of their belongings. A number of Jews were apprehended and brought to the bridge across the Ceremuş (Cheremush in Russian and Ukrainian) River, where they were thrashed with pickets and pitchforks, then thrown into the water and drowned. The next day, the Romanians arrived, and the arrests and killings continued. The gendarmes seem to have brought a “system” to mass murder: with the help of the locals, they executed Jewish men, whereas women and children were detained and later deported to Transnistria. The overall number of Jews killed was about 40; it is not clear how many of them were murdered by the local Ukrainians at the bridge and how many were later executed by the Romanian gendarmes.57 But Jewish sur-

patterns of violence 65

vivors seem to have felt strongly that every local gentile was their enemy.58 One feature that emerges strongly from the testimony of the survivors from Nepolocăuţi: the ideologically motivated hatred of Jews that characterized the pogromists, particularly their leaders. For instance, one of them, Andrei Varzar´, was reported by two witnesses as yelling to Jews: “You wanted Soviets. . . . They are no more; the Germans and Romanians have come, and we will kill all the Jews.”59 Interestingly, this aspect is almost completely lacking from the accounts of the Sochireni pogrom; the only partial exception is the reference to the speech delivered by the medical attendant Krokhmaliuk mentioned above. Two elements thus distinguish the bloody events in Nepolocăuţi (the term “pogrom” is deliberately avoided here) from those in Sochireni: the presence of readily identifiable groups of organizers, who managed to trigger anti-Jewish violence before the arrival of the Romanian troops; and their, as well as many other villagers’, determination to kill Jews, not just to help themselves to Jewish property.

The Role of Ideology All the evidence now available—the findings of the Extraordinary State Commission, records of the postwar trials in the Soviet Union and in Romania, the data collected by Marius Mircu—tends to agree that the intensity of popular anti-Jewish violence was higher in northern Bukovina, and in particular in its rural part, than in Bessarabia. Pogroms in rural northern Bukovina tended to be better organized, more violent, and more oriented toward murder. Pogroms in rural Bessarabia tended to be aimed at plunder and were less murderous. Thus Marius Mircu attributes the mass and systematic murder of Jews before the arrival of the Romanian army to the local population in the Ukrainian villages of Milia, Răstoace, Văscăuţi, and Stăneştii de Jos (all located in Storojineţ county of northern Bukovina).60 Data of the Extraordinary State Commission also contain many references to the murderous anti-Jewish activity of the Ukrainian nationalists in that area and add to the list of localities where Jews were killed en masse by the local Ukrainian residents of the villages of Kiselevo (perhaps Chiseleva?), Banilov-Russkii (Banila pe Ceremuş, Banyliv).61 By contrast, pogroms in Bessarabia usually took place after the arrival of the Romanian army and/or gendarmerie, and the killings of Jews were conducted under the gendarmes’ command.62 It is important to bear in mind that the mass and systematic murder of Jews by the local population before the arrival of Romanian or German troops or gendarmes took place almost exclusively in the Ukrainian villages of the northernmost strip of Bukovina in Storojineţ county (Nepolocăuţi lay

66  vladimir solonari

just a little to the east, in Cernăuţi county). That was where the Ukrainian nationalist underground had the widest support and managed to create its National Guard detachments, to set up its organs of local power, and to effectively control the situation after the departure of the Soviets and before the Romanians’ arrival. They even engaged retreating Red Army troops in numerous skirmishes.63 As John-Paul Himka has argued, in the interwar period the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Galicia underwent a pronounced radicalization, becoming more and more exclusivist, in accordance with the dominant trend at the time in Central Europe: “The language became more violent, the ideology more violent, the political practice more violent. Many of the same impulses that drove the Iron Guard in Romania and Ustaše in Yugoslavia also drove interwar Galician Ukrainian nationalism.”64 As Ukrainian and Western historians agree, in the interwar period the influence of Galician nationalism grew, and by 1941 the Ukrainian nationalist underground in northern Bukovina was under the direct command of the Ukrainian National Committee in Liublin.65 The actions they undertook in early July 1941 were in pursuit of the strategy of taking power and presenting Romanians with a fait accompli. Cleansing the territory of Jews was obviously part of that strategy. Although Romanians were also cleansing the province of Jews, they were in competition with the Ukrainians and were obviously upset by the assertiveness of the Ukrainian nationalists. In northern Bukovina, Romanians saw Ukrainians as more of an “issue” than Jews. The Germans were quick to notice that Romanians tried to benefit from the wartime situation to suppress Ukrainian nationalists. Ereignismeldungen (reports on current events) of Einsatzgruppe D, which in July–August 1941 operated in northern Bukovina and Bessarabia (Gruppenführer SS Otto Olehndorf), reported skirmishes between Romanian gendarmes and Ukrainian nationalists, as well as mass arrests of the latter by the former. Einsatzgruppe D attempted to protect the Germans’ Ukrainian allies. The Nazis clearly saw the Romanian preoccupation with Ukrainian nationalists as a deplorable distraction from the all-important task of fighting the “Jewish menace” and tried to reduce tension between them.66 One can easily surmise why the Ukrainian insurgents tried to “cleanse” the territory of Jews before the arrival of the Romanian authorities: in their minds it was a sign that they were in control. They may also have tried in this way to curry favor with the Germans. If so, they were at least momentarily successful, as the German sources attest. Ukrainian nationalism was not a serious force in interwar Bessarabia, but Romanian extremist nationalism was. In fact, the province was the

patterns of violence 67

stronghold of the Cuzists.67 It is no surprise, then, that Cuzists took the lead in the anti-Jewish massacre in Bessarabia in 1941. But their ethos and their relationships with Romanian authorities were different from those of Ukrainian nationalists: unlike the nationalists, the Cuzists were oriented toward cooperation with the Romanian state. By committing violence against Jews, they thought of themselves as fulfilling the will of the government, and in this they were right.68 There were no competing projects of ethnic cleansing in Bessarabia in 1941: killing Jews was merely part of governmental policy. Unlike the Ukrainian peasants of northern Bukovina, especially in its mountainous section bordering on Galicia, Bessarabian Romanians (Moldovans) were inclined to passively await the arrival of the new/old authorities, sometimes demonstrating in their favor but only rarely taking arms against the Soviets. (An event, such as the one in Ghirovo in which a local attacked retreating Red Army troops, was indeed very rare, possibly unique.)69 From the Bessarabian Romanian perspective, there was no urgent need to kill Jews: delay would have little effect on their fate. This restraint does not mean that Bessarabians were pro-Jewish or that they condemned violence against Jews. The great majority was indifferent to Jewish suffering and ready to enrich itself at the Jews’ expense, as the ubiquity of pogroms and relative scarcity of memories of gentile assistance among the survivors from Bessarabia demonstrate. But most lacked the motivation to kill Jews themselves: this dirty work was left to the soldiers, gendarmes, and local volunteers, usually a minority among the residents in each locality. While former Cuzists took the lead in the killing operations, not only antisemitism motivated their behavior. Indeed, it would have been surprising had that been the case: political parties do not exist in a vacuum; and not every antisemite, even a violent one, in interwar Romania was a Cuzist. Other killers who were not identified as members of any party were recorded as saying, “all Jews must be killed,” or “I would not spare any of them.”70 Characteristically, it was not only former Cuzists who sometimes used to boast of killing Jews and displaying extreme cruelty toward them; some killers without a clear political orientation did so as well.71

“All Jews Are Communists” “Pure” antisemitism, hatred, and willingness to kill Jews solely because they were Jews were, however, rather rare. More often than not, hatred of Jews was motivated by the Jews’ supposed welcome of and collaboration in the Soviet invasion and occupation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in 1940–41. Many local killers apparently wanted to believe that all Jews were Commu-

68  vladimir solonari

nists. They wanted to imagine that by killing Jews they were taking revenge on those who in 1940–41 had humiliated them, denied them their identity and religion, confiscated their property, held them in constant fear, and arrested and deported their kin. For all that, they believed, or at least claimed to believe, their Jewish neighbors were responsible. For that, the Jews were to be murdered—men, women, and children. The Soviet occupation brought many hardships to the population of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, of which the deportations of 12–13 June 1941 were the most traumatic. On these two days, the Soviets deported 17,000–22,000 people from Bessarabia and 3,600–6,000 from northern Bukovina.72 The list of categories of people earmarked for deportation by the Soviets was extremely vague, and only a brief time elapsed between Moscow’s decision to deport (in mid-May 1941) and the arrest and deportation itself.73 These circumstances encouraged arbitrariness on the part of local officials. We still know too little about how the victims of mass deportation were selected on the spot—say, in a particular locality. There can be no doubt, however, that the authorities relied on local officials, such as Soviet-appointed heads of the village councils (sel´sovety) and directors of village clubs, local nationalized mills, procurement agencies, and so on for recommendations of candidates for deportation. Two recently published documents from the Romanian archives, kept there since World War II, shed light on this stillmysterious topic. The first represents an order of 15 May 1941 from Bolgrad District (raion) Executive Committee Chairman Galkin to one Kalgev (or Kalchev), chairman of the Kubei (or Cubei) village council, directing him to “compose lists of residents of your village council who are slated to be expelled from your village—one list for heads of the households [only], and another for those who will be expelled together with their families.” The numbers of those to be expelled were to be communicated “immediately.” The second document is an answer to that order; though it was not dated, one can safely assume that it was indeed delivered “immediately.” Chairman Kalgev reported that 125 heads of household and 25 families were slated for expulsion from the village of Kubei.74 It is not clear whether these documents refer to the deportation of 12–13 June 1941, or whether they meant “expulsion” of suspects from that village with the view toward their resettlement within the same or neighboring districts of the province further to the east, away from the border with Romania. According to one Moldovan historian, the Soviets often engaged in such resettlement in 1940–41, before the mass deportation of 12–13 June. (Cubei was located on the right bank of the Prut River, in what the Soviets called a “frontier zone.”)75 In fact, the date seems to suggest that the second possibil-

patterns of violence 69

ity is more likely to be true: it seems quite improbable that a party and government decision of 14 May could have reached the district level by 15 May and that local district chairmen would act on it literally the same day.76 But in one way or another, these documents do show how the mechanism of selection worked in practice, and it is quite possible that the same people who in 1940–41 had been resettled within the newly annexed provinces were in June 1941 deported further to the east. The change of regime in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina occurred within two to six weeks following the mass deportation, so it is of little wonder that the memories of that tragedy and the thirst for revenge on those who were seen as responsible for it surged powerfully in July and August 1941. As one Romanian soldier from the Seventh Cavalry Regiment recalled in his deposition during the 1950 investigation, “chaos [zăpăceală] reigned there [in Bessarabia], as if it was the civil war.”77 Former Soviet officials who failed, for various reasons, to evacuate, were apprehended and quite often murdered by the locals who held them responsible for the fate of their kin. Those whose close relatives had been deported often participated in rounding up, guarding, escorting, and executing Jews. As one Jewish woman, Sarra Prokopets-Ferdman, recounted, in June 1941—that is, before the arrival of Romanian troops—she was arrested in her own home in the village of Ciuciuleni in central Bessarabia by a group of local peasants. Her mother and a group of other Jews who happened to be there were arrested at the same time. Her friend Motia Getman, also a Jewish woman, asked one of the peasants, Nicolae Chiriac, who came to arrest them, “What harm did we do to you that you take us?” To this Chiriac responded, “My father also did no harm [to anybody], but they deported him [to Siberia].” “His father,” Sarra Prokopets-Ferdman added parenthetically, “was deported as a kulak [wellto-do peasant].”78 This scene was emblematic of what was taking place everywhere in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Tellingly, Chiriac here did not try to prove, nor indeed did he claim, that Sarra Prokopets-Ferdman or any of the Jews who assembled at her house bore any individual responsibility for the fate of his father. For him they were guilty as Jews, and no proof of their particular role in his father’s fate was needed. As Jews, they were by definition Communists, pro-Soviet, and anti-Romanian and had to be dealt with accordingly. According to a few eyewitnesses in the postwar investigations, perpetrators did make this assertion in describing their motive for taking part in the mass murder of Jews. So, in the village of Onişcani in central Bessarabia, one Vasile Crăciun, according to an eyewitness, a former Cuzist and kulak

70  vladimir solonari

appointed by the Romanian commanding officer as this village’s mayor, explained to the local priest his reasoning for killing Jews: “Soviet power deported all the good people from our village. . . . Now that the Romanians are here, we have to arrest and kill all Jews.”79 But how prominent had Jews been among those responsible for the selection of “suspects” slated for deportation at the local level? There are many reasons to believe that they really were not. In interwar Bessarabia, and maybe to a lesser degree in Bukovina, many Jews were more left-wing than the rest of the population, as indeed was the case in the whole of Eastern Europe. Many of them may have harbored pro-communist sympathies, and the Jews certainly played a prominent role in the communist underground.80 Whether or not the Jews were guilty of massive violence against the retreating Romanian army and administration in late June–early July 1940, as the Romanian military claimed at the time, is open to doubt. It is, however, more or less certain that they tended to welcome the Soviets, out of either ideological or pragmatic considerations (because they were seen as a lesser evil), whereas local Romanians tended to be scared or depressed. But, as Michael Bruchis was the first to show, it was one thing to welcome the Red Army and quite a different matter to benefit from the Soviet occupation. Soviets tended to distrust members of the Romanian communist underground, disbanded Bessarabian communist organizations, and requested that their members apply as individuals for membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). All leading personnel in the newly created Moldavian SSR were imported from the east of the Dniester.81 The importation of cadres from central and eastern Ukraine was also the policy pursued by the Soviets in northern Bukovina.82 On the village and township levels, however, the norm was the selection and appointment (legitimized in fake “elections”) of more or less trusted locals. Because the higher authorities lacked the knowledge of local conditions and available cadres, the selection was erratic and subject to various influences—resulting in frequent, unpredictable, and apparently pointless appointments, dismissals, and new appointments that lasted the whole first year of the Soviet occupation.83 But chairmen of the village and town councils were almost invariably local gentiles, hardly ever Jews: the Soviets were aware of popular antisemitism and did not want to exacerbate it.84 After the war, while informing Soviet officials of the killings in the summer of 1941, eyewitnesses clearly distinguished two kinds of targets of the murder campaign: Jews and Soviet activists, mostly chairmen and secretaries of the local soviet, or sometimes heads of collective or state farms. This clear distinction in itself is a sign that in the great majority of cases those petty Soviet officials were not Jews.85

patterns of violence 71

While Jews were rounded up and systematically shot in Bessarabian villages (in Bukovina, as was shown above, gendarmes shot them as well, but often they “just” rounded up the Jews and deported them), Soviet activists of non-Jewish origin were routinely arrested, severely beaten, and sent to the nearby military tribunal to be tried. There they were usually sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, from a few months to 20 years, and/or fined. In addition, they were sometimes sentenced to the confiscation of their property and stripped of their Romanian citizenship, but the death sentence was never applied.86 Moreover, in the mini-civil war then raging in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, gendarmes sometimes actually protected Soviet nonJewish activists from other villagers’ thirst for revenge. (As a rule, these were the same villagers who helped gendarmes round up and murder local Jews.) Such a scenario took place in the village of Oneşti in central Bessarabia. As the former Soviet agitator (his official position) Dmitrii Rozhka (Dumitru Roşca?) testified, Dmitrii Antoki (Dumitru Antochi?) wanted to shoot him together with the Jews, but the chief of the gendarme post forbade Antoki to do it.87 In the village of Petreşti in central Bessarabia in July 1941, gendarmes and their collaborators arrested 27 Jews and 3 non-Jewish Soviet activists. Soon afterward, they shot all the Jews and interred their bodies. One of the collaborators, Petr Sanduliak (Petru Sanduleac), asked the chief of the gendarme post to shoot three remaining activists, but the chief refused saying, revealingly, “I have no order [to do this]” ( prikaza net).88 It is instructive to inquire where the policy of killing Jews and protecting gentiles originated: was it a local initiative, or did it come from the Bucharest government? Available evidence indicates that local initiative predominated. In the weeks right after the takeover of these provinces, gendarmes treated non-Jewish activists in northern Bukovina much more harshly than they did those in Bessarabia, as an account from Hotin county testifies. In July 1941, Hotin County Prefect Joe Gherman inspected the village of Vărtecăuţi, populated by members of the Ukrainian minority, where he was addressed by a group of residents complaining that gendarmes arrested and expelled across the Dniester more than 100 men from the village. Shortly afterward, four women from the Ukrainian village of Ruşini submitted complaints that their husbands had been arrested by the gendarmes, brought to the nearby forest, and executed.89 Gherman received other, similar reports, all leading him to conclude that gendarmes in the county frequently arrested, deported, and executed members of the Ukrainian minority. Determined to put an end to such practices, Gherman summoned the head of the county gendarmerie, Major Drăgulescu, and ordered him to stop. According to Drăgulescu’s own deposition, he responded to Gherman that

72  vladimir solonari

the gendarmes acted in accordance with the order of General Topor; and since it was wartime, he could not “revoke an order issued by the army on the basis of an order from the prefect.” Some time later, probably in late August or early September, Drăgulescu was introduced to the newly appointed governor of the province, General Corneliu Calotescu. Calotescu had already been briefed by Prefect Gherman, and he asked Drăgulescu for further information. The governor was visibly displeased. “The army does stupid things, and we have to fix them,” he said when he heard Drăgulescu’s report. According to Drăgulescu, Gherman’s intervention led to a change of policy toward Soviet collaborators of Ukrainian nationality.90 As stated by the same source, General Topor issued the order on “cleansing the terrain” at the conference in Fălticeni, which Drăgulescu did not attend. Colonel Mânecuţa, Drăgulescu’s immediate superior, then transmitted the order to Drăgulescu in Hotin county. Drăgulescu recalled its content as “All Ukrainians and Romanians who supported the Communists were to be transported across the Dniester River, and all members of minorities [or a minority, minoritarii, probably meaning Jews] of that category were to be exterminated.”91 If one can believe Drăgulescu in this context, the order issued at Fălticeni was significantly milder than those issued at Roman and Galaţ to gendarme officers heading to Bessarabia. Extraordinary State Commission records, however, make it clear that in Hotin county, gendarme officers routinely murdered Jews—sometimes en masse and systematically, sometimes less so—and not infrequently executed Soviet activists of non-Jewish origin.92 We can explain this discrepancy either by dismissing Drăgulescu’s deposition as unreliable or by supposing that many gendarmes overfulfilled the order, interpreting it as a license to decide unilaterally how to punish supposed enemies of the state. Only after Prefect Gherman’s intervention was the policy moderated and some of those expelled returned from across the Dniester. In either case, the cleansing policy in Hotin county, Bukovina, appears to have been evolving and subject to various local influences, without fixed direction from either the provincial center or Bucharest. In contrast, Major Berzescu, the commander of Storojineţ Legion, whose gendarmes’ more moderate behavior toward local Jews I discussed above, declared in his postwar depositions that although he had received the order to cleanse the terrain, he decided not to carry it out and instead extended his helping hand to Jews harassed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) militia. Berzescu clearly implied that he was moved by humanitarian considerations.93 His claim receives some support from his wartime informa-

patterns of violence 73

tion reports, issued in July–August 1941, in which he used surprisingly mild language with regard to Jews. The same reports, however, also contain abundant complaints about local Ukrainian nationalists’ anti-Romanian feelings and actions.94 Since in Berzescu’s county, Ukrainian nationalists were the ones undertaking deliberate and brutal actions against Jews, Berzescu’s more moderate stance vis-à-vis Jews may have derived at least in part from his regarding Ukrainians as a more immediate threat.95 Again, we can see how local gendarme commanders, their perception of the situation on the ground, and even their value systems could influence the cleansing policy in northern Bukovina. As for Bessarabia, evidence points to the provincial gendarme inspector, Colonel Meculescu, as the one most responsible for the policy of relentless extermination of Jews combined with the protection of Christian Soviet collaborators. On other occasions, too, Meculescu had shown himself to be a fanatical antisemite who stubbornly refused to believe all evidence that Jews were in reality much less implicated in Soviet misdeeds than Romanian propaganda incessantly claimed. So, in August 1942, he sent a circular letter to the provincial gendarme legions expressing his outrage at the supposedly “incomplete” data on the role of Jews under the Soviets, which his subordinates had previously collected and supplied to his office. “It is very curious,” he wrote menacingly, “that the percentage of Jews [as shown in previous reports] is very small, though it is known that they were the most devoted promoters of the communist action.” To illustrate this state of affairs, he provided the following numbers: in Bălţi county, of 192 chiefs (conducători) under the Soviets, only 24 were listed as Jews; in Cahul county, of 16 chiefs, none was found to have been a Jew; and in Chilia Nouă county, only 3 of 128 chiefs were Jews. Meculescu’s conclusion was unambiguous: “The data should be doublechecked from this standpoint, since the situation as it is presented today is incomplete and contradicts the facts.” For Meculescu, his own antisemitic imagination was the “facts,” and if what other people called “facts” ran against it, he was determined to change reality—or ignore it as irrelevant. To Meculescu’s more than probable chagrin, even after his censure the Bălţi Gendarme Legion (i.e., the only legion that did the job, or the only one whose revised data survived) sent him back a deeply unsatisfactory answer: among 114 chiefs at all levels, only 22 were Jews, 12 of 98 top civil servants were Jews, none of the 27 chiefs of police was Jewish, and so on.96 Given its failure to find a “Jewish hand” behind every Soviet crime, it is no wonder that when the Romanian administration published a propaganda volume on Bessarabia, it

74  vladimir solonari

decided to do away with the facts altogether: the volume contained practically nothing in terms of hard evidence against the Jews, while abounding in the harshest possible antisemitic rhetoric.97 It is thus quite possible that the policy, pursued by the gendarmerie in Bessarabia as early as July 1941, of “killing all Jews while protecting pro-Soviet gentiles from the rage of their neighbors” bore an imprint of Meculescu’s fanatical antisemitic convictions. Whether this interpretation is correct or not, one thing is certain: even if this policy was initiated at the middle level of the command chain, it soon received support from the very top. For good reason, too: as the Romanian authorities were to find out in due time but had probably intimated quite early, the number of collaborators in the provinces was far too high for it to be remotely conceivable to punish them all, let alone execute them. According to the information disclosed by Ion Antonescu to the Committee of Ministers on 16 November 1943, in Bessarabia alone 40,000–50,000 local Romanians (Moldovans) “became more Russian than the Russians [under the Soviets], persecuting the Romanian population.”98 Especially worrying from a Romanian perspective was that the socalled intellectuals—teachers, librarians, priests, and civil servants—who failed to evacuate to Romania in 1940 were the first to show their loyalty to the Soviet authorities. As Governor of Bessarabia General Constantin Voiculescu pointed out in April 1942, he could not “put everybody [guilty of collaboration] in the [concentration] camp because [if he did,] nobody [would] remain [at liberty].”99 To Antonescu and his government, ethnic Romanians (Moldovans) from the provinces were members of their own community of blood, their nation (neam in Romanian), even if temporarily lost: they merited more humane punishment and eventual reeducation, not extermination. As Antonescu himself put it, “I cannot condemn all those who decided to stay in Bessarabia and Bukovina [under the Soviets] and say that they all are rascals.” He added that these people, as well as the whole Romanian nation, had to be assisted by his government to become better Romanians.100 By the late summer of 1942, the Romanian government concluded that it had to restrain the desire of local Christians to take bloody revenge on their Christian neighbors who had cooperated with the Soviets in repressing their own. Left unchecked, such rage was unproductive at best, dangerous at worst. It had to be tamed and channeled. Local Christians had to be made to forget who their real tormentors were and persuaded that Jews, including the elderly and infants, bore the main responsibility for the woes visited on them during the year of Soviet occupation. Jews were thus “appointed” Communists by the Romanian authorities, and none of them had the right of appeal.

patterns of violence 75

It is hard to see who among the local gentiles could believe any of this—except those who were already convinced.

Patriotism, Corruption, and Insanity That was the message local gentiles in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were getting from the Romanian military, gendarmerie, police, and various civil servants: the Romanian government wanted them to help round up and intern Jews and often to kill them, as many and as quickly as possible. The message was brought home both by word of mouth and by the deeds of the returning authorities. Everybody who had eyes and ears could discern its meaning: killing Jews was tantamount to proving one’s own loyalty to the state, one’s own worth as a “good Romanian.” In the village of Cobâlca (Kobylka, now Codreanca) in central Bessarabia, about 80 Jews were shot in July 1941. The executions were carried out by the Romanian army and later by the gendarmes with the support of the locals. Before ordering the shooting of a group of five Jews, one Romanian officer, Mironescu, addressed a crowd of local onlookers who assembled at the site to watch the execution: “Those who are faithful to Romanian power and who have Romanian blood in their veins have to prove it by taking rifles [and shooting the Jews].” Two of the locals, who, as they confessed in August 1944 during the investigation, felt themselves to be loyal Romanians, followed this calling and did as the officer suggested. Then they proceeded to finish off the wounded, search the corpses for valuables, and inter them.101 One perpetrator later confessed to his fellow villagers that he executed Jews, “thereby fulfilling his duty to the Romanians.”102 In the eyes of the Romanian authorities, Jews stood for communism; and some local perpetrators, especially the more ideologically hardened, agreed. Thus in the village of Barboieni in central Bessarabia, one perpetrator reportedly said to the Soviet activist whom he arrested: “Did you see how Germans kill Jews? We will kill them all, and we will kill all Russians as well. . . . Romanians and Germans will conquer all the world, while Russians with their hordes have failed.”103 On entering in a particular village, the Romanian military or gendarmes would appoint a mayor and sometimes his assistants (delegat, secretar). The decision would be made on the spot, often based on initial impressions of whether a particular peasant was demonstrating enough enthusiasm, was better dressed than others, or had served any length of time before 1940 in the same capacity.104 Those appointed immediately received a commission to round up Jews and Soviet activists, bring them to a particular place—usually a club, school, or basement thereof—and to guard them there until further

76  vladimir solonari

orders were given. Later they would be expected to participate in the captives’ execution.105 It was the newly appointed mayor’s responsibility to select a group of helpers to accomplish the tasks quickly and efficiently. Some helpers would later receive permanent positions in the newly formed village administration, most often the job of gardianul public, popularly known as gardist. Gardists’ functions included enforcing order, keeping villagers under surveillance, apprehending Soviet parachutists and partisans, arresting suspicious strangers, and forcing fellow villagers to fulfill various kinds of public works, mostly road improvements and the restoration and construction of public buildings—a highly unpopular corvée.106 For this, gardists received a meager salary, sometimes supplemented by various privileges from the gendarmes (less onerous public work, etc.).107 All these functions, even the pettiest ones, were highly coveted by the locals. Though many mayors would be replaced by the Romanians shortly after their appointments, and not all killers would become gardists or other petty officials, in July 1941 those who were put in a position of authority, even temporarily, were eager to show their readiness to serve the government. Killing Jews was perceived as a test of loyalty, and they were determined to pass it. So, in the village of Ghirovo in central Bessarabia, one perpetrator, a former Cuzist and in 1941–44 a gardist (in this case, he was called a paznic, a colloquialism for gardist) told interrogators in August 1944 that he took part in the execution of Jews “because he was raised in the spirit of antisemitism and because he was duty-bound, the chief of the [gendarme] post having ordered him to do it.”108 Whether antisemitism or the desire to curry favor with his superiors was the primary reason for the transformation of this barely literate peasant into a perfect killer, one cannot know for sure, but one can safely assume that both played a role. In addition to promises of a position of authority among the locals, killers sometimes received on-the-spot compensation. Usually the Romanian military and gendarmes would allow their helpers to search the dead bodies of their victims for valuables or to strip them and take the clothes for themselves and their families. Given the widespread poverty and scarcity of essential items, such offers proved attractive for many. To give just one example, in the village of Pepeni in central Bessarabia, Chief of the Gendarme Post Ion Bordei organized a horrendous massacre of Jews (more than 300 people killed) in late June 1941, having mobilized for this purpose about two dozen locals. The killings were carried out with incredible cruelty, using saps, chains, shovels, sticks, and so on. People were also buried alive. As compensation, Bordei gave one of the most monstrous killers, Vasilii Panika (Vasile

patterns of violence 77

Panica), a suit that Panica had taken from a murdered Jew, as well as some other clothing and a pillow. In May 1944, when Panica was being interrogated, he appeared in the same suit, which he had been wearing since the day of the execution.109 Corruption was central to the economy of mass killing. The Romanian military and gendarmes, eager to kill as many Jews and as quickly as possible while expending no more resources than absolutely necessary, were highly interested in receiving assistance from the locals. In a sense, one can say that active local participation was crucial for the success of the whole enterprise. To enlist such cooperation and to motivate killers, the Romanian military and gendarmes more often than not resorted to the surest and simplest means: bribery. In turn, the prospect of easy and rapid self-enrichment motivated the worst—the most morally depraved people, the dregs of local society—to come to the Romanians’ help. Tellingly, in many cases of outright corruption, the main villains were peasants who were even poorer and less cultured than other villagers (bedniak, negramotnyi, and malogramotnyi, in Soviet parlance) and, it seems, sometimes widely despised by their fellow villagers.110 This rabble played the leading role in some of the worst, most horrendous, and most barbaric massacres in the whole wave of murder in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in the summer of 1941. One such massacre took place in the town of Rezina in northern Bessarabia near the Dniester River. Unfortunately, this event remains somewhat mysterious, mainly because its investigation was carried out very inadequately in June 1944. Initially, one perpetrator from among the locals gave a detailed description of the massacre of several hundred Jews shortly after the arrival of the Romanian troops and police in the town. Jews who failed to evacuate with the Red Army were initially killed randomly by the Romanian soldiers. Then, following a familiar Bessarabian pattern, the Romanian officer Popescu ordered Romanian soldiers, seconded by a group of locals, to arrest Jews and to detain them in the nearby valley on the premises of the calcining plant. The executions started: Jews were shot in lots of 50–60, mostly at night. Because of the shortage of manpower and the noise—the roar of the guns, the groans and screams of the victims—however, Popescu resolved to find a more efficient and less onerous way to deal with his victims. At this stage, the wagoner Pavel Sergeenko (Sergheenco) suggested that, rather than execute Jews by shooting, it would be easier and more efficient to dispose of them in a huge limekiln with an aperture at the edge of the slope of the chalk precipice along which the walls of the kiln were erected. The advantage of this type of execution, as Sergeenko explained, was that the Jews would not be able to figure out where

78  vladimir solonari

they were being escorted until the last moment (the operations were to be conducted at night), so they would not cry and groan until the last moment, the nearby population would not hear anything, and no cartridges would be expended. Popescu accepted this idea, and during the next few days several hundred Jews were killed in this manner. They were taken in small groups at night to the edge of the precipice, pushed into the aperture with sticks, and died when their bodies smashed against the stone floor of the 30-meter high kiln. Not all of them died instantly; some had to be dragged out of the stove and finished off, usually with sticks.111 All this is known from Sergeenko’s own graphic description. He initially tried to deny his role but then cracked and confessed. The problem was, however, that the whole operation took place in a sparsely populated place and under the cover of darkness. There were no survivors and no eyewitnesses besides the perpetrators themselves; and none of them, with the exception of Sergeenko, confessed to anything but stealing items confiscated from the murdered Jews (things that had been found in their homes during a search). Investigators found but one corpse, and they explained their failure to find more by suggesting that the bodies had been washed away by the Dniester River during its regular spring floods—not an entirely implausible supposition given that floods are indeed notoriously powerful in that area.112 Because Sergeenko retracted his testimony during the trial, the court was left with no reliable evidence; and as a result, perpetrators were sentenced to ten years imprisonment for plunder of the victims’ possessions—a grand judicial failure, given the weight of their probable guilt.113 Still, whether the Jews were killed as described by Sergeenko or shot by the Romanian soldiers, as other defendants claimed, nobody denied they were murdered. Nor could it be denied that almost all residents of the valley, which consisted of about five families, participated in the arrest, escort, and guarding of Jews, as well as in the plunder of their property. Who were these gentiles? All of them belonged to the lowest strata of Rezina society: they were illiterate, coarse, poor, embittered, and resentful. They seem to have known one another well enough, and some of them were kindred, but their relationships were venomous and baleful. No traces of ideological antisemitism could be found in the files—only evidence of greed, inbred cruelty, and opportunism. As one witness, Irina Vieru, recounted, in 1941 Sergeenko boasted how he threw two Jews into the stove, and when she asked him, “Were you not afraid of doing such a thing?” he responded, “The Red Army will never return to Rezina.”114 While Vieru was asking Sergeenko how he could overcome the psychological barrier (which she assumed was natural to all humans) against inflicting such suffering on innocent people, he un-

patterns of violence 79

derstood her question in purely practical terms and answered accordingly: it was safe to kill Jews, so he killed them. When the investigator asked Kilina Karpova (Chilina Carp) how she could appropriate things that belonged to people who had just been executed, she simply said: “Why should I not take them, if they were sitting there, already collected?”115 Among this group, Sergeenko seems to have been particularly obnoxious. Not only did he play an especially monstrous role in the mass murder of Jews in 1941–44, but he also acted as an informer for the Romanian police in the interwar period, and the first thing he did after his arrest in 1944 by the Soviets was to try to make himself useful to his new masters by pretending he could turn in former Romanian spies.116 One other case of unbelievable and horrendous cruelty took place in the village of Marianovka de Sus in central Bessarabia. Fortunately for latter-day historians, this case was much better investigated than some of the others. Before 1940, this village was populated by ethnic Germans who in the fall of that year were “repatriated,” together with their co-nationals from all over Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, to the Third Reich, according to a special Soviet-German treaty.117 Following their removal, the Soviets set up a nursing home for invalids on one section of the abandoned property. All in all, they brought about 350 invalids there, including approximately 130 Jews. When the Romanians returned, they decided to disband the institution and kill the Jews. (Non-Jewish invalids were, it seems, moved to similar institutions in other localities.) In July or August 1941, a Romanian officer, whose identity was not established, summoned the chair of the village council, Nikolai Germaniuk (Nicolae Ghermaniuc), ordered him to kill all Jews, and immediately offered him the post of mayor. Germaniuk at once agreed. He called on the institutional attendants—among them a wagoner, a sawyer, and a nurse—assisted by volunteers from among the gentile invalids, to round up and drive Jews to a barn, which they did. Using sticks as their weapons, this group drove Jews out of the salons, stripped them, and forced them to run naked along the street to the barn. There they were locked up while their tormentors started to dig a grave. It took them seven days to accomplish this task, during which they used to drive the Jews naked through the village, beating them with sticks and tormenting them in various other ways. The mayor and gendarmes walked along “laughing like animals.” While kept in the barn, the Jews were denied food and drink; and when on the seventh day they were brought to the place of their execution, they could not stay on their feet. The Romanian soldiers and gendarmes used machine guns to shoot the Jews in the presence of other invalids but did not kill them all immediately. A nurse found a group of Jews hiding in a nearby haystack and reported them to the

80  vladimir solonari

chief of the gendarme post. He ordered them arrested, brought to the execution site, and shot immediately. The killers and their helpers then brought eight carts to transport the dead bodies to the grave; the Jews were thrown into the grave and buried while some of them were still alive.118 Why would people whose job was to serve invalids so lightheartedly agree to torture and kill them? They apparently had difficulty explaining themselves. This is how one of the cruelest killers, Andrei Kononov, described how he, together with others, became a murderer: “Having received this brutal [zverskii ] order [to beat and to bring Jews to the execution site], we immediately agreed and carried it out.” He added that nobody forced him to take part in the execution; he did it on his own initiative.119 Kononov was a sawyer; he was illiterate and spent his whole life in the most abject poverty, ending his days in a madhouse. Other attendants at the nursing home were also illiterate and probably as poor as Kononov, though no proof of their insanity exists. Still, they were, if judged by the protocols of their interrogations, even less articulate than he was. The only thing that can be said with certainty about their motives is that corruption did play a role. Kononov, for example, explained that in compensation for his efforts he received a pair of “new leather shoes,” and other accomplices received similar rewards.120 Did it matter to people like Kononov and other “ordinary killers” from Marianovca de Sus that their victims were Jews? Or would they have killed anybody the authorities asked them to kill with the same gusto, especially if promised a “new pair of leather shoes”? There is no way to know for sure, but it seems likely that they would have. But then, how great a role did such people play in the mass murder campaign in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina? Unfortunately, no answer with any degree of certainty can be given to that question. ----With the withdrawal of the Red Army and the entry of the German and Romanian troops in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in July 1941, Jews were under attack everywhere. While the primary responsibility for the Jewish tragedy lies with the German and Romanian military and Romanian gendarmerie, participation of the local populations in anti-Jewish violence was massive and ubiquitous. Everywhere, Jews were beaten, robbed of their possessions, and humiliated by the local gentiles. Still, popular violence against Jews was not systematically murderous everywhere. For it to be so, one of two conditions had to be met: either there had to be a core of antisemitic nationalists committed to the political project of a Jew-free country and supported by a considerable portion—better yet, an absolute majority—of the locals; or the killings had to take place under the direction of the Romanian military

patterns of violence 81

and gendarmerie. Ukrainian nationalists in northern Bukovina, and former Cuzists in Bessarabia, were examples of this type of core militant, ever ready to kill Jews and eager to do it even before the arrival of Romanian (or German) troops. In other cases, the troops’ presence and guidance catalyzed the transformation of popular antisemitic violence into a systematic campaign of murder. The first condition occurred in a minority of provincial localities; the second prevailed in the majority. The Romanian military and gendarmerie organized the systematic murder of Jews by relying on the support of a minority of local Christians, who acted based on one of the following motivations or a combination of them: an ideological hatred of Jews and willingness to kill them en masse; a strong desire to curry favor with the new authorities by carrying out the task entrusted to them—arresting and killing Jews; or sadistic instincts and a primitive desire to enrich themselves quickly at the expense of their victims. The first two motives were characteristic of the better-educated, more respectable local gentiles; the third tended to attract local rabble. The experience of the Soviet occupation played only a limited role in motivating participation in anti-Jewish violence. The most difficult and painful part of that experience, the mass deportation of 12–13 June 1941, was not immediately attributable to Jews, at least at the local level; and to the extent that local gentiles wanted to punish those whom they saw as directly responsible for that outrage, those people tended to be Christian rather than Jewish. In response to that situation, Romanian authorities developed a policy of protecting former Soviet activists of non-Jewish origin against their vengeful neighbors. Though Romanians tried to present Jews as responsible for all wrongs that local gentiles suffered at the hands of the Soviets, it is quite probable that only convinced antisemites actually believed this charge. What ultimately made such massive violence against Jews possible before the very eyes of the local Christian population, however, was the Christians’ willingness to condone it, if not always to actively participate in it. Romanians, unlike Germans in neighboring Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union, were returning to what they considered their national territory; they were restoring there what they—and most other people in Europe and the world—believed was their legitimate authority. Unlike the Germans, they were not occupiers, not ready to disregard the opinion of the local Christians, especially those who they believed were ethnic Romanians. Had this part of the population protested the persecution and murder of their Jewish neighbors, nothing of the kind would have happened. Instead, objections almost never arose. This failure to protest sealed the Jews’ fate. These findings tend to support interpretations of the Holocaust that em-

82  vladimir solonari

phasize its origin in modernity, with its compounding visions of cleanliness and order and the notion of the ordering power of the state. In this sense, this chapter casts doubt on the theory that traditional antisemitism could lead to the systematic killings of Jewish populations. Although popular antiJewish violence in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in July and August 1941 was ubiquitous, for it to spill over into an orgy of mass murder and systematic ethnic cleansing a state, or an aspiring state, had to direct it. In either case, mass murder and ethnic cleansing were accomplished in the name of a similar goal: a “purified” nation—a quintessentially modern vision. Left to themselves, out of the purview of these agents of modernity, nonindoctrinated local gentiles engaged in more traditional forms of antisemitic rioting: beating, plundering, and humiliating Jews. But this behavior, though morally outrageous, would not amount to what we call the Holocaust.

5

"Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population"



The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–45



Karel C. Berkhoff

W

hen Nazi Germany invaded the expanded Soviet Union in June 1941, how likely was it that the Soviet media would report in a substantial way the mass murder of the Jews of Europe, known today as the Holocaust or Shoah? There was a precedent in a Soviet public record about Nazi antisemitism. On 30 November 1936, Pravda reported Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov’s speech of five days earlier on the occasion of the new Soviet constitution. Condemning fascism for its hostility toward Jews, Molotov cited a previously unpublicized comment by Iosif Stalin that “antisemitism, like any form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism,” and added that “brotherly feelings for the Jewish people” would “define our attitudes toward antisemites and antisemitic atrocities wherever they occur.” The Soviet press also covered the pogroms in Germany in November 1938, referring to a “massacre of a defenseless Jewish population.” That same year, two Jewish filmmakers could release Professor Mamlock, the first Soviet film depicting the persecution of Jews in Germany.1 But Stalin, himself a killer of millions, was not interested in the people killed by Nazi Germany and its allies. During the war with Germany, what mattered to him were the Soviet citizens who offered armed resistance and prevented the exploitation of the occupied regions.2 He suspected all others no longer living under his control of “treason,” for reasons that likely must remain unclear and despite being aware of their difficult if not desperate situation. Many Soviet officials and journalists shared or adopted this suspicion. 83

84  karel c. berkhoff

Even some who were themselves of Jewish descent did so: David Iosifovich Zaslavskii, a prominent commentator who specialized in the public denunciation of intellectuals, was able to visit the sites of the murder of the Jews of Kharkiv in December 1943. “Those killed were the less stable and worthy part of Soviet Jewry, the part that more and more lost both personal and national dignity,” he wrote in his private diary. Many seemingly had even deserved to die: “Any Jew who, for whatever reason, remained with the Germans and did not kill himself, condemned himself to death. When, in addition, he, for private gain, kept his children with him and thus exposed them to death, he became a traitor.”3 When to the suspicion one adds Stalin’s personal if usually hidden antipathy to Jews, the likelihood that readers of the main Russian-language Soviet newspapers such as Pravda, Izvestiia, Trud, and Krasnaia zvezda and those listening to Soviet central radio could find out that the Nazis were targeting Jews in particular seems slim indeed.4 Nevertheless, as I argue here, they could. Such explicit reports did exist and were more numerous than has been assumed. Although Soviet media items often attempted to conceal that the Nazis were deliberately killing all the Jews, this concealment never became a policy. It was nothing but a tendency that never became entirely consistent. Reports about the three meetings in Moscow of “representatives of the Jewish people” and various articles by Ilya Ehrenburg (Il´ia Erenburg) mentioned the Jews as victims. Other articles that appeared on various occasions also did so. Even as late as November 1944, as the present study reveals, Pravda wrote that 1,700,000 Jews had been gassed to death at Birkenau. All investigations of the presentation of Nazi mass murder by the Soviet media during the war with Nazi Germany focus on the campaign known today as the Jewish Holocaust. The first studies, written at a time when intense antisemitism pervaded Soviet life, emphasized a total or near-total silence about the mass murder of the Jews. Thus Solomon M. Schwarz wrote in 1951 that “the very fact of the wholesale extermination of Jews” was “shrouded in silence” and “kept out of the Soviet newspapers.”5 Gennadii Kostyrchenko wrote in his Tainaia politika Stalina (Stalin’s Secret Policy) of a Soviet wartime cover-up (zamalchivanie, umolchanie) about the “Hitlerite genocide of the [Soviet] Jews.” The Soviet leadership, allowing for just a few exceptions, “decided . . . to remove any reference to the cruelties inflicted by the fascists on the Soviet Jews from the open press and radio.”6 Many other researchers hold this view. The Russian scholar Pavel Polian has stated that “information about the genocide and about the antisemitic specificity of the German crimes did not appear on the air or in headlines,” and the British historian

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 85

Catherine Merridale writes that before May 1945 the Soviet media did not mention Auschwitz.7 Most scholarly interpretations are more cautious, but to varying degrees. The works by Shimon Redlich and Zvi Gitelman on the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC) in the USSR and postwar Soviet reactions to the Holocaust neither accept nor modify the notion of wartime “silence.”8 Jehoshua Gilboa, in The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, came close to agreeing with Schwarz about media silence. He noted: “Soviet announcements and publications during this period point to a deliberate attempt to conceal the Jewish tragedy behind general descriptions of German ferocity. Only rarely were massacres of Jewry specifically mentioned, the dominant line adopted being not to single out such massacres from among the ‘criminal plans aimed at annihilating the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and other peoples of the Soviet Union.’”9 Likewise, Walter Laqueur wrote in The Terrible Secret that with a few exceptions, the wartime Soviet media made “no mention of the fact that the [Soviet] Jews were singled out for ‘special treatment’”—that is, for mass murder. He did not say if the media treated the murder of non-Soviet Jews in the same manner.10 Arno Lustiger stated, “the murder of the Jews could be reported only in publications that were unavailable to the wider Soviet public.” He also noted some exceptions.11 In his study of Soviet newspapers in the Stalin period, Jeffrey Brooks also found Soviet reports on the killings of Jews “scarce,” with even writers of Jewish descent such as Ehrenburg downplaying their “exceptionality.”12 A more nuanced interpretation comes from Heinz-Dietrich Löwe: “The Soviet reader . . . hardly ever got a full picture of the extent of the annihilation of Jews by the Nazi regime of terror in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. Neither the importance of Nazi racism, which targeted the Jews in a very special way, nor the methodical character of the killings perpetrated by the SS, SD, and the Wehrmacht, and in particular the ‘industrialized’ character of the mass exterminations in camps like Auschwitz, were ever fully reported and analyzed.” Only thick journals such as the monthly Znamia gave some clarity, Löwe argues.13 Possibly—though not explicitly—in contradiction to the above, Mordechai Altshuler, Lukasz Hirszowicz, and Amir Weiner have written, respectively, that “accessible information about the Germans’ anti-Jewish atrocities had returned to the official Soviet media from the very first days of the German–Soviet war”; that “a considerable amount of material about the Holocaust (obviously without using this or any similar description) appeared in the Soviet Union”; and that “as early as October 1941 the mass murder of the

86  karel c. berkhoff

Jews throughout Europe and the Soviet Union was publicly exposed.” Like most others, these authors cite few newspaper articles and no Communist Party archival collection dealing with newspapers.14 Works by several authors—Lev Aleksandrovich Bezymenskii, Ilya Altman (Il´ia Al´tman), Joshua Rubenstein, and Corinne Ducey—explicitly counter the notion that Soviet coverage was deliberately meager or nonexistent from start to end. Bezymenskii wrote in 1998 that a “perceptible drop in press items and TASS reports about Jewish pogroms and ghettos” set in only “sometime in 1943.” Altman found that Jews as victims were either omitted or categorized as civilians—but only during the war’s “final phase,” meaning after the battle of Stalingrad in early 1943. Before then, a different situation existed. Rubenstein, Ehrenburg’s biographer, agrees: “public references to Jewish suffering came almost entirely in the first years of the war.” Ducey writes that “many articles were dedicated solely to the persecution and extermination of the Jews” but refers almost exclusively to Ehrenburg.15 None of these analyses of the wartime Soviet media and the Jews clarified whether they applied in equal measure to reports about Soviet Jews and reports about Jews killed outside “Soviet territory.” The only researcher to address this issue has been Yitzhak Arad. Having surveyed Pravda, Izvestiia, and Krasnaia zvezda, he concluded that they “constantly concealed the total extermination of the [Soviet] Jews” but did mention the mass murder of non-Soviet Jews, in reports in 1943 about the Warsaw ghetto and in one reference in 1944 to the deportation of Jews from Hamburg to Minsk. Overall, however, Arad’s verdict was harsh: far too little information was released in a country where “even Soviet Jews could not openly refer to the totality of extermination of Jews and the uniqueness of their fate.”16 This chapter tests the notion of wartime Soviet neglect of the Nazi mass murder of the Jews. It aims to answer the following question: between June 1941 and May 1945, how and when did the Russian-language Soviet press and radio that was directed at the Soviet hinterland (Soviet territory not, or no longer, occupied by Germany or its allies) report, distort, or ignore the Nazi mass murder of Jewish civilians? I end with a tentative explanation for the nature of the reporting.

Reports Received by Stalin The first task is to establish what kind of reports Stalin received about the Nazi killing of Jews, and when. The former Committee of State Security (KGB) archives in Moscow and particularly the new Presidential Archive continue to bar almost all outside researchers, but some conclusions can be drawn. The first known report by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD)

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 87

about the occupied Soviet regions reached Stalin on 19 July 1941.17 Army intelligence and NKVD reported murder and violence against all ethnic groups but also, as the historian Niels Bo Poulsen has pointed out, made plain that various ethnic, political, and social groups were singled out—physically disabled people, psychiatric patients, prisoners of war (POWs), communist and party officials, and Jews.18 As Altman has plausibly argued, Stalin became aware of the Nazi aim of killing all Jews—or at least all Soviet Jews—no later than August 1941. In the middle of that month, Panteleimon Kondrat´evich Ponomarenko, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Belorussia, informed Stalin in writing that the “Jewish population [in the villages of Belorussia] is subjected to merciless annihilation.”19 On 26 August, Aleksandr Sergeevich Shcherbakov, the secretary of the Central Committee who headed the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformbiuro)—founded on 24 June 1941 with the explicit aim of monopolizing all information about internal, international, and military affairs—received a revealing NKVD report on occupied Ukraine. It not only referred to rapes, murdered peasants, and ethnic German collaboration but also stated that the “physical extermination [fizicheskoe istreblenie] of the Jewish population in German-occupied regions of Zhytomyr, Kam˝ianets´-Podil´s´kyi, and Vinnytsia oblasts does not abate.” The report offered details on Zhytomyr oblast, where the “pogroms of the Jewish population with bloody victims do not cease”: on 9 August, 27 Jews had been killed on Zhytomyr’s outskirts; and in the night from 13 to 14 August, up to 200 Jews had been shot three kilometers outside the town of Berdychiv (Berdichev); “Ukrainian police participated in the shootings.” Early in August, up to 400 Jews from various regions, “mostly women and children,” had been gathered in Kam˝ianets´Podil´s´kyi and “destroyed,” ending up in pits dug by Soviet prisoners of war. The phrases “does not abate” and “do not cease” strongly suggest even earlier reports about killings targeting Jewish civilians. If they still exist, they have remained classified.20 By the middle of 1943, Stalin had on his desk a long and perceptive analysis of German occupation policy in Soviet regions. Written in Moscow on the basis of intelligence received through March 1943, the report stated bluntly (and accurately), in a section called “Anti-Jewish Terror,” that “massive extermination of the Jews began during the first days of occupation,” and a “new wave of Jewish pogroms and executions began in the summer and fall of 1942.” The document mentioned shootings and lethal injections and added— in an apparent reference to Treblinka—that “there are reports that Jews are taken to a concentration camp near Białystok and killed there with electric current.” (Polish Białystok was considered Soviet territory because it had

88  karel c. berkhoff

been incorporated into Soviet Belorussia at the time of the pact with Germany.) The writer added curtly that the “Gypsies are subjected to the same massive extermination.”21 As will become clear below, the Kremlin soon captured Nazi documents that bespoke a lethal antisemitism. Along with the Soviet intelligence reports, this means that early on, Stalin and his associates were told by various sources that the Nazis were exterminating all Jews and Gypsies (Roma and Sinti). They had no lack of information. Our investigation of media reports begins with a look at the relatively well-known published statements by prominent Jews, followed by separate discussions of reports about Soviet Jewish victims and reports about other Jewish victims.

Statements by Prominent Jews Prominent Soviet Jews, who from January 1942 had gathered in the JAC created by the Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop), organized meetings of “representatives of the Jewish people” in Moscow. These events were directed at foreign, particularly American, Jews, but they were not just reported abroad and in the Soviet Yiddish-language weekly Eynikayt (Unity). They reached large Russian-speaking Soviet audiences as well through radio broadcasts and newspaper reports. At the meeting on 24 August 1941—as reported in Pravda, Izvestiia, and elsewhere—JAC Chair Solomon Mikhoels warned that Hitler was after the “total destruction of the Jewish people.”22 An open letter to the Jews of the world raised the alarm: “If in the enslaved countries bloody fascism introduced its ‘new order’ with the assistance of the knife and gallows, with the assistance of fire and violence, with regard to the Jewish people bloody fascism has planned a gangster program of the total and unconditional destruction of the Jews with all the means at the fascist butchers’ disposal.”23 Reports on the second meeting of Jewish “representatives” held on 24 May 1942 reproduced an open letter to Stalin, which called the current persecution of the Jews without precedent. They also carried a new open letter to all Jews according to which the “Hitlerites” considered all non-German peoples racially inferior and were killing “Russians and Ukrainians, Belorussians and Poles,” but which also presented Jews as most at risk: “The Jewish people has a great sorrow. In the cities that they have seized the Hitlerites give an excruciating death to Jewish men, Jewish women, Jewish children, Jewish old people. Before killing them, the Hitlerites torture the Jews, rape the women, kill children under their mothers’ eyes. They bury people alive and desecrate the graves. There are cities and villages where Jews worked the

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 89

benches and tilled the soil and where now not a single Jew has remained—old person or infants: all have been killed at Hitler’s command.”24 On Red Army Day, 23 February 1943, allegedly at the order of the Second Plenary Meeting of the JAC, Mikhoels and Shakhno Epshtein sent Stalin a letter that was also published. This time, however, it remained unclear whether the Jews had a special fate: “Millions of our brothers and sisters, just like the sons and daughters of other peoples who have fallen under the yoke of the cannibal Hitler, bleed profusely. The suffering of the Jewish popular masses knows no bounds. Ruin and destruction hang over their heads. The grief of the mothers and the story of the children buried alive shock the world.”25 On 2 April 1944, the committee organized another meeting, broadcast on the radio and extensively reported in Eynikayt.26 Izvestiia and Trud had only a brief item ten days later that summarized Epshtein’s words on Jewish war heroes.27 Pravda carried the longest Russian-language report.28 Whereas Eynikayt reported Mikhoels’s statement that in recent years, “four million” Jews had been murdered in Europe, or a “quarter of the Jewish people,” Pravda omitted this passage. (It retained Mikhoels’s pride in the “sons of the Jewish people” who were fighting for “our Soviet motherland,” “inspired and united by the great Russian people,” and alongside “representatives of all the peoples of the USSR.”) Yet Pravda’s quotations from another speech, by Itsik Fefer, still left no doubt about a specific Nazi policy against the Jews. The “fascists do not only want to exterminate our people. They want us to disappear from the face of the earth with a coward’s mark on our forehead. It did not happen!” Jews were fighting hard in the Red Army, he explained. (Omitted here was a statement that the “ashes of Babi Yar [Ukr. Babyn iar] are searing our hearts.”) Early in the war, the prominent Russian Jewish writer and journalist Ehrenburg suggested to Shcherbakov that the central press publish an article by a well-known Russian figure denouncing the “fairy tale” that “Hitler is angry only with the Jews.” Eventually, only he himself had such an article published. The Germans, he wrote in Krasnaia zvezda in October 1941, wanted to annihilate one half of the people of the Soviet Union and to enslave the other half. “They say, ‘We are against the Jews.’ It’s a lie. They have Jews of their own, whom they favor. These Jews have their passports marked with the letters ‘W.J.,’ which means ‘Valuable Jew.’” The Germans “hate all peoples except the Germans and despise all races except the German race.”29 For almost the entire war, Ehrenburg seemingly had an unwritten license from Stalin to write pretty much as he liked. Referring to a story about

90  karel c. berkhoff

the Kharkiv tribunal where Ehrenburg called the victims “Russians, Jews, [and] Ukrainians,” Brooks has argued that this author downplayed Jewish “exceptionality.”30 Yet Ehrenburg also published several articles mentioning Jews that left little doubt that all of them were being killed and implied that the Nazi treatment of the Jews was different. Ehrenburg wrote in Krasnaia zvezda on 1 November 1942, “Hitler wanted to turn the Jews into a target.” He and his henchmen had killed Jewish girls and old people, and Jewish Red Army soldiers wanted to avenge them.31 In September 1943, he wrote that the “Germans took Jews from various countries to Minsk and gassed them there”; in November 1943, that they had killed all the 1,600 Jews of the Ukrainian town of Pyriatyn.32 Pravda’s report of 5 April 1944 on the most recent meeting of Jewish “representatives” quoted Ehrenburg as talking about Jewish resistance: “The Germans thought that the Jews were a target. They have seen that the target shoots. Not a few dead Germans could talk about how the Jews are fighting. Children of Russia, citizens of a Soviet Republic, we go into battle shoulder to shoulder: Russians and Georgians, Ukrainians and Jews, Armenians and Tatars.” More important, this came after a statement about Jewish victims: “There are no more Jews in Kiev, in Warsaw, in Prague, in Amsterdam. But in the [Ukrainian] village of Blahodatne 30 Jews were saved. At the risk of his own life, the kolkhoz accountant Pavel Sergeevich Zinchenko saved them. The oath of friendship is written not with ink but with the blood of the best.”33 In early August 1944, when the Red Army reached the old German state border, Ehrenburg reminded his readers of the “death factories” and gas wagons near Minsk, in Bełżec [Belzhets], and in Sobibór [Sabibur]. Here as elsewhere, “trains with Jews arrived from France, Holland, Belgium.” Large numbers of non-Jews, he added, had also been shot and gassed.34 As late as December 1944, he could mention the murdered Jews of Europe in Pravda and even number them—6,000,000. Not only Jews had suffered: those indoctrinated by “nationalism” had “decided to put to the wall large, talented, strong peoples.” Ehrenburg then made a remarkable statement about what we now call the Holocaust: In the countries and regions captured, the Germans killed all the Jews: elderly people, babies. Ask a captured German on what ground his compatriots destroyed 6,000,000 innocent people and he will answer: “They are Jews. They are black-haired (or red-haired). They have different blood.” This began with stupid jokes, with the shouts of street kids, with signposts, and it led to Majdanek, Babi Yar, Treblinka [Tremblinka], and ditches filled with children’s corpses. If before Treblinka antisemitism

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 91

could seem an everyday deviation, then now this word is soaked with blood, and the Polish poet Julian Tuwim is right to say, “Antisemitism is the international language of the fascists.”

Ehrenburg’s next sentences barely removed the emphasis on the Jews: “Now the whole world sees the results of racial and national arrogance. The ovens of Majdanek—in which the Germans burned people of 30 nationalities only because they were Russians, French, Poles, or Jews—these terrible ovens did not emerge immediately; they were prepared by a long education based on misanthropy.”35 The conclusion here must be that those statements by Soviet Jews that made it past the censor of Russian-language publications did say, if not always emphatically, that all the Jews of Europe were being killed.

Reporting on Soviet Jews and Ignoring Other Jews In his radio speech to the Soviet population on 3 July 1941, Stalin described a matter of “life and death of the peoples of the USSR”: namely, the fascists’ aim to “Germanize” the Soviet peoples by restoring “tsarism” and the “rule of the landlords,” so as to obtain “slaves of German princes and barons.” At risk was the “national culture and the national statehood of the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Belorussians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Estonians, the Uzbeks, the Tatars, the Moldavians, the Georgians, the Armenians, the Azerbaijanis, and the other free peoples of the Soviet Union.”36 Thus the main threat was not so much death as enslavement, and Jews were omitted. Nevertheless, soon reports about Jews appeared in the media. From then through 1942, these mentioned Soviet Jews as victims—not often, but sometimes. In its report for the evening of 16 August 1941, the Sovinformbiuro included the following sentence within a long report of German robberies and killings: “In some raions of Zhytomyr oblast, the Germans committed bloody Jewish pogroms. In Iemil´chyne the fascists buried 32 Jews alive.” Two weeks later, it reported that “in the town of Kam˝ianets´-Podil´s´kyi, the fascists gathered 400 Jewish refugees from various regions, mainly women and children, and shot all of them.”37 A special correspondent reported that month about the Podolian town of Antoniny, where “fascists” had been unable to force Ukrainians to bury the local Jews. The first Germans entering had looted and raped and had shot three officials (rabotniki); a group of Germans who came later (obviously an SS murder squad) singled out the Jews: In the town square the Germans in the presence of the inhabitants forced four Ukrainians to dig a pit. Then they pulled out four Jews and threw

92  karel c. berkhoff them inside. An order came: “Cover them!” No one moved. People froze on the edge of the grave they dug. “You don’t want to? All right!” The Jews were ordered to climb out of the pit. “Lie down there!” the corporal shouted at the Ukrainians. Again there came an order to cover the pit. No one threw a handful of soil into the grave with living people at the bottom. Threats to shoot all at once did not work either. Waving with his submachine gun, the corporal nudged the people numb from horror: “Cover it!” From someone’s feet a lump of earth broke loose and fell down. It was what the torturers had been waiting for. They pulled the Ukrainians from the pit and told them, “See, the Jews want to bury you alive. Pay them for this in the same way.” But still no one raised a finger for the vile crime. Then the Germans took the spades themselves. Four Jews were buried alive.38

The Sovinformbiuro produced a similar account, quoting an eyewitness, about a concentration camp near Minsk.39 Early in September the Red Army entered the town of El´nia in Smolensk oblast and held on to it for two days. Trud and Izvestiia immediately described the shooting of several locals “just because they were Jews.”40 An article of mysterious provenance, “The People’s Hatred” by “N. Petrov” in Izvestiia on 27 September, gave the severest warning of the danger facing all Jews since the first meeting of “Jewish representatives.” Stalin’s records in the Moscow archives state in passing that this Petrov was actually the Soviet head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, and indeed, a postwar Soviet study ascribed this particular article to Kalinin. (Neither source gives an explanation.) Whether Kalinin actually wrote the article is unclear. In any event, “Petrov” argued that according to the “fascist” ideology, the “Jews, who, fascism claims, bring disasters to Germany, must be destroyed.”41 For that same month, the first case of deliberate, if incomplete, omission of known Jewish victims can be documented. The Sovinformbiuro statement for the evening of 22 September 1941 included translations from the diary of “Emil Goltz,” said to be a German soldier and Nazi party member. One passage (supposedly written in Modlin northeast of Warsaw in June 1941) went as follows: “We have been put up in the Jewish district. When you see these loitering figures, one feels like pulling the trigger and shooting the rabble. Well, just wait, we’ll get you!” By mistake, the Soviet Union provided foreign media with a translation that was more explicit. It quoted another note as “Passing through a town, I participated together with Walther in the cleansing of a Jewish store.” The version used within the Soviet Union omitted the Jewish aspect: “Passing through Slonim together with Walther, I participated

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 93

in the cleansing of stores and homes.” The “internal” version also omitted a July reference to searches of “abandoned Jewish homes.”42 Why and by whom these early omissions were made is unclear. In his October Revolution Day message of 6 November 1941, Stalin personally mentioned mass killings for the first time and referred to Jews. The Hitlerite regime engaged in certain activities “just as eagerly as the tsarist regime did”—such as “arrang[ing] medieval Jewish pogroms. . . . The Hitlerite hordes kill and rape peaceful inhabitants of our country, without sparing women, children, and elderly people.”43 Trud commented that Vladimir Lenin had known that antisemitism served only one purpose: to distract the masses. Now the “Hitlerite pogromists” had broken a record in killing “tens of thousands of people.” The context made it evident that this referred to Jews.44 Stalin’s November message also established that not just Jews faced a mortal threat. The invader was conducting a “war of extermination with the peoples of the USSR,” and he mentioned here the “great Russian nation” and the “Slavic peoples.” Yet at this stage of the war, the notion that not only Jews but all the Soviet peoples were targeted for extermination did not bar reports focusing on Jews. For example, Pravda reported (accurately) on 16 November that on 23 October, the Romanian army in Odessa had committed “one of the biggest mass murders of Jews in history.” The paper put the death toll at 25,000. Stalin himself had removed from the draft what had preceded the massacre: the killing of over 200 Romanians by a Soviet mine. This means that he had personally allowed the word “Jews” to remain.45 Similarly, referring to TASS in New York, Pravda and Izvestiia reported on 19 November that the “Germans executed in Kiev 52,000 Jews—men, women, and children.” Pravda referred ten days later to the “Jewish pogrom” in Kiev that killed 52,000. For some reason, it added that “also Ukrainians and Russians” died in it.46 After the Red Army recaptured the eastern Ukrainian town of Lozova on 22 January 1942, Pravda reported that the “Hitlerites” had shot all the Jews residing there.47 Molotov, foreign affairs commissar and Stalin’s deputy in the Council of People’s Commissars, sent four notes to the countries with which the Soviet Union had diplomatic relations. Like the statements from the Jewish meetings, they served foreign policy goals but also reached Soviet audiences. The first and fourth notes, of 24 November 1941 and 11 May 1943, dealing with Soviet prisoners of war and deportation to and enslavement in Germany, are less relevant here.48 The second note, of 6 January 1942, revealed “wholesale robbery, despoliation of the population, and monstrous atrocities [chudo-

94  karel c. berkhoff

vishchnye zverstva] committed by the German authorities in the occupied Soviet territories.” It followed Stalin’s line of November 1941, in speaking of a Nazi plan for the “annihilation of peace-loving peoples” as well as in referring to Jews as victims (in L´viv, Kiev, and elsewhere), and in its characterization of the Nazi killings in Ukrainian towns as “particularly directed against unarmed defenseless Jewish working people.”49 Also in January 1942, Stalin obtained, perhaps for the first time, German documents confirming the killing campaign directed against Jews. Walter von Reichenau, commander of the German Sixth Army, on 10 October 1941 had issued instructions on “The Conduct of the Troops in the Eastern Space.” Among other things, the pro-Nazi general meant to suppress concerns among the German military about the mass murder of the Jews, such as committed recently at Babi Yar. “The main goal of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the total smashing of the state power and the extermination of the Asiatic influence on European culture,” he explained. This was a “mission to liberate the German people once and for all from the Asiatic-Jewish danger.” German mass murder in the “East” was both in retaliation and for the sake of security. There the German soldier of necessity was an avenger of “bestialities” committed against Germans and related peoples and thus ought to have “full understanding for the necessity of the harsh but justified revenge on Jewish subhumanity.” Killings were also needed to suppress uprisings in the army’s rear, “which as experience shows always were incited by Jews.” Soviet officers discovered the instructions in the recaptured town of Kalinin (now Tver´), and on 14 January, the NKVD leader Lavrentii Beria sent Stalin and Molotov a photocopy and a generally accurate Russian translation.50 Stalin saw to it that Pravda published the document the next day. There was a facsimile of the entire document but also a (faulty) translation that omitted all the antisemitic passages except “Asiatic-Jewish danger.” Readers with some knowledge of German could see the deviation from the original. Pravda’s editorial, probably written by Stalin, did not mention the Jews at all, stating that Reichenau’s Hitler-approved order aimed for the extermination of the “male population” of the occupied Soviet territories. It simultaneously claimed that “peaceful inhabitants”—not just males—were under threat and that at issue was the “physical extermination of the Russian people, the Ukrainians, the Belorussians, and all the other peoples inhabiting the Soviet Union.”51 It so happened that Reichenau died of a stroke on 17 January. In the media response, Stalin, again removing lethal antisemitism, added to the draft report that Reichenau’s order had aimed for the “extermination of the peaceful Soviet population.”52 These reports about Reichenau to date are the

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 95

only known documented cases of Stalin personally ensuring the removal of the Jewish background of Soviet victims. A similar case of inconsistent removal occurred the next month. The Soviet authorities found telling documents in the headquarters of the First SS Cavalry Brigade, including a report about a “Pripet Action” conducted between 27 July and 11 August 1941. Thousands of civilians died in that campaign of mass murder, the vast majority of them Jews. The report included this passage: “Driving women and children into the marshes did not have the required result, for the marshes were not deep enough to allow for drowning. At a depth of 1 meter in most cases one reached solid ground (probably sand), so that drowning was impossible.” An article in Izvestiia in February 1942 by Battalion Commissar L. Dubrovitskii quoted all this. It did not clarify that these women and children were Jews.53 The writer or his censor also omitted an explicit passage about “gathering the Jews,” and the comment that “Jewish looters were shot. Only a few artisans, who had been put to work in repair shops of the Wehrmacht, were left aside.” Yet the removal of Jews was inconsistent, for the article quoted accurately the following from another captured report, about the “pacification” of the Belorussian townlet of Starobin: “There was an order to shoot all Jewish males without exception, which was carried out. . . . The auxiliary police carried out a number of executions and arrests.”54 Krasnyi flot several times reported the murder of Jews in southern cities; Sovetskaia Ukraina described the shooting of the Jews of Mariiupol´ and Artemivs´k in Ukraine’s Donets´ River basin; and Pravda’s Petr Aleksandrovich Lidov wrote that “almost the entire Jewish population of Minsk has been exterminated.”55 In contrast, a report about Dnipropetrovs´k omitted the Jewish ancestry of the victims there: it described the way in which 16,000 people had been deceived before being shot at the cemetery on 13 and 14 September 1941.56 That deceptive report paved the way for the public proclamation of a “non-Jewish” line, Molotov’s third note of 27 April 1942. Dealing with “monstrous villainies, atrocities, and outrages committed by the German-fascist invaders,” this text emphasized more than any other leading Soviet statement before or since that Nazi killings were indiscriminate. There existed German “plans and orders” for the “extermination [istreblenie] of the Soviet population, prisoners of war, and partisans by bloody violence, torture, executions, and mass murders [massovye ubiistva] of Soviet citizens, irrespective of their nationality, social standing, sex, or age.” Most murders were committed “solely to intimidate or exterminate the Soviet people.” Omitting Jews and most others (not to mention other occupied European regions), Molotov’s note referred merely to the “Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and other peoples of the Soviet Union.”57

96  karel c. berkhoff

Yet even after this statement there came reports on Soviet Jews that called them Jews. TASS reported in June that the Federation of Jewish Philanthropic organizations in London heard from a refugee that the “Hitlerites and their agents killed in the first four days of the occupation of the Latvian SSR 25,000 Latvian Jews. The Hitlerite pogromists terrorized the population of the Jewish quarters and confiscated from them literally all their belongings. Twenty-nine thousand Jews have been herded into a ghetto in Riga, where they are living in horrifying conditions.”58 The Russian writer Mikhail Sholokhov could be antisemitic—he said once that “Abram is doing business in Tashkent”59—but his short story “Nauka nenavisti” (The Science of Hatred), published in Pravda to mark the first anniversary of the German invasion, vividly depicted the selection for shooting of Jewish POWs. It included Sholokhov’s rendition of the tale of a Siberian lieutenant in the Red Army. This possibly fictional Gerasimov related how immediately after he and his comrades were captured, they were lined up. “A German lieutenant asked in poor Russian if there were any commissars and commanders among us. Everyone was silent. Then he said again, ‘Commissars and officers, two steps forward.’ No one left the line. Walking by slowly, the lieutenant picked out about 16 people who looked like Jews. He asked each one, ‘Jude?’ and without waiting for a response, ordered them out of line. Among those selected were Jews, Armenians, and simply Russians with a dark complexion and black hair. Before our very eyes, all of them were taken aside and shot with submachine guns.” The story was reprinted often and appeared in 21 other languages.60 Reports on the June 1942 session of the Supreme Soviet provide further evidence of inconsistency about Jewish suffering, and indeed reveal an unwillingness among some officials to fully adopt the line expressed by Molotov. Speakers from Belorussia, Estonia, and Lithuania followed him in omitting Jews but singled out the threat to just one other non-Russian nationality. The Russian-born Panteleimon Ponomarenko Belorussianized the victims of Nazi murder in “his” Soviet republic: they were the “sons and daughters of the Belorussian people. . . . Never in its entire national history has the Belorussian people been subjected to such a danger. At stake was and is the life and death of the entire people.”61 Johannes Vares, chair of the Estonian Supreme Soviet, told his audience that “in Estonia the Hitlerites killed in a beastly fashion many thousands of peaceful citizens—women, children, and old people” but added, as if in conclusion, that the “German fascists want to destroy the Estonian people, erase [it] from the face of the earth.”62 Justas Paleckis, a journalist by profession with moderately left-wing views who chaired the Presidium of the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet, declared that the

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 97

Germans were “systematically carrying out the Germanization and extermination of the Lithuanian people.” His was the only speech not reported to receive extensive or loud applause, probably because Paleckis asserted that throughout history, “no other people in the world has suffered so much from German invaders as the Lithuanian people.”63 In contrast, two other speakers reportedly mentioned the Jews. Vilis Lācis, writer and head of the government of Soviet Latvia, mentioned the mass murder of the Jews and “completely innocent people.”64 Leonid Romanovych Korniiets´, Soviet Ukraine’s first people’s commissar, identified the three nationalities who had been murdered in Ukrainian cities by the hundreds of thousands as “Ukrainians, Russians, Jews.”65 Thus scrutiny of reports on Soviet Jews well into 1942 reveals two things: Stalin’s initiative, no later than January 1942, for stripping Nazi Germany’s Jewish victims of their Jewishness; and a lingering inconsistency in application of this line, even among Soviet leaders. All the while, the media took a different approach in discussing Jews in Europe who were not Soviet citizens. Although mentioned initially, they quickly disappeared from sight. On 19 July 1941, a brief notice referring to an interview by United Press with the former Chilean ambassador to Romania said that “in Romania, under pressure from the Germans mass persecutions of Jews are being carried out.” The diplomat had “seen on gallows the bodies of citizens whose only crime was that they were Jews.”66 Sovetskaia Ukraina carried a play by Oleksandr Korniichuk in which a partisan read from a captured German diary about the burning alive of Jews in Rotterdam.67 This kind of publicity about non-Soviet Jews soon became exceptional. In the first year of the war with Germany, the Soviet media treatment of Jews victimized by Germans and others elsewhere in Europe was consistent—those Jews merited little or no attention. Important reports from Poland made headlines in the United Kingdom and the United States and probably reached the Kremlin. In May 1942, the socialist Jewish Bund in Warsaw informed the London-based Polish government-in-exile that a transition toward the mass murder of all Jews was underway. In articles on 25 and 30 June, the Daily Telegraph said that “more than 700,000 Polish Jews have been slaughtered by the Germans in the greatest massacres in the world’s history” and headlined “More Than 1,000,000 Jews Killed in Europe,” in what it called a campaign designed “to wipe the race from the European continent.” The Bund report contained “the most gruesome details of mass killings even to the use of poison gas.” The New York Times republished the articles (on 30 June and 2 July), the BBC paid attention, and so did the Polish underground paper Rzeczpospolita Polska (on 2

98  karel c. berkhoff

July).68 Until December 1942, the Soviet press completely ignored all this, for reasons that unfound archival documents may yet reveal. The Soviet media also neither mentioned nor used the references in the Polish underground Biuletyn Informacyjny in April, June, July, and August 1942 about gassings in named death camps (Chełmno, Bełżec, and Treblinka-II).69 Perhaps the bulletin did not reach Moscow at that stage; but even if did, it seems unlikely it would have been used. On 14 October 1942, the “Soviet government,” once again informing its own citizens only indirectly, publicly told the “governments of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Norway, Greece, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg and the French National Committee” that it fully agreed with an Allied declaration concerning punishment for war crimes. No victim group, Jewish or not, was mentioned. Expressing a desire for an international tribunal, Moscow “confirmed” that the crimes were “universal and deliberate,” though the Soviet Union, it implied, had suffered the most: the German government and its accomplices “have also made it their aim to carry out the direct, physical extermination of a considerable section of the population of the territories captured by them.”70 When in November 1942, Stalin spoke for the first time in a year of Germany’s goal “to enslave or eradicate the population,” he too did not elaborate.71

Interlude: Jews and Ukrainians Soviet citizens must have been surprised when on 18 December 1942, all the major Soviet papers published a long, joint Allied condemnation of the “extermination of the Jewish population of Europe.” 72 The next day, a long statement by Molotov’s commissariat placed this extermination in what was considered a proper perspective. According to Bezymenskii, the draft of this statement referred to the dangers of antisemitism; however that may be (the archival reference is incomplete), the final text did not do so.73 The perspective instead was that of a larger planned assault on many peoples, not just the Jews: “Recently, throughout the territories of the countries of Europe occupied by the German-fascist invaders, a new intensification of the Hitlerite regime of bloody massacre [krovavye massovye raspravy] of the peaceful population has been observed.” The “criminal Hitlerite rulers” had various reasons: they wanted “to drown in the blood of innocent people their animal fear of approaching doom and retribution,” and they realized that they could not break the “will of the peoples of Europe for the restoration of their independence and freedom.” Hence they now were “putting into practice a bestial plan for the physical extermination of a considerable part of the civilian population of German-occupied territories—absolutely innocent people

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 99

of various nationalities, social positions, views and creeds, and all ages.” Only then did Jews specifically enter the stage, even with emphasis: “In doing so, the Hitlerites and their associates are putting into practice at an accelerated rate their special plan for the total extermination of the Jewish population in the occupied territory of Europe.” The specific “atrocities against the Jews” and (especially, so Moscow seemed to argue) the “fanatical propaganda of antisemitism” were smokescreens. Hitler and his associates wished to “divert the attention of the German people from the disaster that is facing fascist Germany” and to “drown their own innumerable crimes against the peoples of Europe.”74 Less authoritative comments focused on the Jews even less. N. Matiushkin asserted in Trud that the “fascist ‘philosophy’ justifies the extermination of entire peoples, especially the Slavs.” As a result, “about three million Poles” were dead.75 Thus even in December 1942, there was an attempt to weaken the focus on Jews. This attempt should not obscure, however, the appearance of the original joint Allied document and of other explicit articles, even though relegated to the fourth and final page of newspapers and at the very end of radio news broadcasts. On 13 December, the media summarized two alarming foreign reports. One was a document received by U.S. President Roosevelt from American Jewish organizations: “Hitler has ordered the destruction of all the Jews in the occupied regions [of Europe]. Two million Jewish men, women, and children have already been killed. Five million more are under threat of similar destruction.”76 The other summary was explicitly based on a Polish government-in-exile note of 9 December that, according to TASS, mentioned Nazi Germany’s “intention to exterminate the Polish people,” as well as that the “German authorities aim with systematic deliberation at the total extermination of the Jewish population in Poland.” “Over a third” of Poland’s 3,130,000 Jews had died in the past three years, and Warsaw Jewish Council Chair Adam Czerniaków had killed himself. The Polish note, TASS wrote, included “details of Himmler’s March 1942 decree about the extermination of 50 percent of Polish Jews by the end of 1942.” But TASS did omit some important elements. The original note referred to the “Jewish population of Poland and of the many thousands of Jews whom the German authorities deported to Poland from Western and Central European countries and from the German Reich itself.” Moreover, TASS did not quote that the trains were sent to “three localities: Tremblinka [sic], Belzec, and Sobibor,” thus missing another opportunity to refer to such camps.77 A little later in December, it was reported that a Swedish newspaper had demanded the opening of the Swedish border to Norwegian Jews who oth-

100  karel c. berkhoff

erwise would be shipped to their deaths in Poland, and that Canadian officials had said that Nazi Germany had killed at least two-thirds of Europe’s 6,500,000 Jews.78 In this period of relative centrality of Jews as victims, Stalin apparently decided to publicly assure the Soviet Union’s second-largest nationality, ethnic Ukrainians, that their suffering was not being overlooked. Articles marking Soviet Ukraine’s twenty-fifth anniversary in Pravda and other papers dramatically Ukrainianized the human suffering taking place there. They omitted not only Jews but also all other non-Ukrainians, including Russians. On 25 December 1942, Stalin and Molotov placed a congratulatory note on Pravda’s front page. It was to be the second—and last—time since November 1941 when Stalin publicly mentioned the ethnicity of victimized Soviet citizens. “Hitlerites” had “exterminated and tortured to death hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men, women, and children.” 79 Pravda’s editorial mentioned only Ukrainians, not even Russians.80 Krasnaia zvezda’s editorial spoke of the killing by Germans of “hundreds of thousands of peaceful Ukrainian inhabitants. . . . The enemy is carrying out his monstrous plan for the physical extermination of millions of Ukrainians and the total robbery of the Ukrainian people.”81 The Kremlin’s short-lived Ukrainian focus helps explain why in an appeal to the Ukrainian people that same month, Korniiets´, Mykhailo Hrechukha, and Nikita Khrushchev said Nazi Germany was implementing “Hitler’s devilish project to physically exterminate the Ukrainians and all the Slavs.”82 According to the central Soviet press, in addressing a celebration, Korniiets´ did not mention any non-Ukrainian victims. The “German bandits” had killed “85,000 men, women, old people, and children” in Kiev within eight months, and had killed overall “over two million peaceful Ukrainian inhabitants.”83

Soviet Jewish Victims At the beginning of 1943, a paradoxical development began. Whereas Soviet Jewish victims were identified as Jews far less often than before, the Soviet Russian-language media often identified Jewish victims in Poland and elsewhere beyond the Soviet Union as Jews. A good example of the neglect of Soviet Jews was a report about crimes committed in Rostov, published in March 1943 after Stalin’s personal perusal; it spoke of citizens, not Jews.84 On two occasions, Stalin publicly confirmed the trend. On 1 May 1943, he called the victims of “extermination by the Hitlerite beasts” (as well as of deportation to “German slavery”) merely “Soviet citizens”; and on 6 November 1943, in his last public reference to the victims of Nazi Germany, he said Red Army

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 101

advances had brought to light the extermination of “hundreds of thousands of our peaceful people.”85 The rare exceptions usually involved Soviet Jews from cities close to the front line and the excavation of bodies. Of the first category, there were perhaps only two cases. In January 1943, less than two weeks before the Red Army retook the Russian town of Velikie Luki, TASS reported, “from the very first day of their arrival in the town the Germans started to shoot groups of inhabitants,” and gave a specific example: “One night, they chased 28 Jewish families to the town fortress and subjected them to excruciating torture. Then they forced the condemned to dig a pit. On the order of the officers, soldiers completely stripped the men and women and started hitting them with birches. Those who resisted were beaten with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets. The execution was monstrous. Urged on by bayonets, the victims of the Hitlerite henchmen approached the pit one by one. There were terrible scenes. A mother saw her daughter being shot, a son witnessed the execution of his father, a brother of his sister.”86 Articles in the month of Kiev’s recapture, November 1943, also mentioned the Jews. Aleksandr Ostapovich Avdeenko and P. Olender, correspondents for Krasnaia zvezda, said those summoned to and eventually murdered at Babi Yar had been “Jews, Communists, and workers at a range of Soviet establishments.” Evgenii Genrikhovich Kriger of Izvestiia extensively quoted a witness, Dmitrii Orlov, who began by mentioning the Jews and then supposedly kept referring to “people.”87 Reports about recaptured Kharkiv, meanwhile, omitted Jews entirely. A favorable review of Alexander (Oleksandr) Dovzhenko’s documentary Bitva za nashu Sovetskuiu Ukrainu (The Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine), released in October 1943, two months after the city’s recapture, quoted the voiceover accompanying footage of an unearthed mass grave: “Look, living ones, do not turn away from our terrible pits. . . . There is a great multitude of us in Ukraine. Do not forget us. Seek vengeance against Germany for our suffering.” Likewise, the writer Nikolai Semenovich Tikhonov wrote of 14,000 killed “Kharkivans.”88 As for the regular Sovinformbiuro reports, it appears that they already stopped identifying victims as Jews in late 1941. This line continued, except in one November 1944 reference to the Latvian forests as the setting for mass shootings of “peaceful Soviet inhabitants—Russians, Latvians, Belorussians, and Jews.”89 The Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Orga-

102  karel c. berkhoff

nizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR, henceforth called the Extraordinary State Commission, was founded in early November 1942 and headed by the trade-union leader Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik. Like the Jewish meetings and Molotov’s notes, the reports (soobshcheniia) compiled by the Extraordinary State Commission reached Soviet citizens even though they were primarily intended for the Allies. They mainly aimed, in Marina Sorokina’s words, “to give international legal legitimacy to documentary materials that had been both collected and created by the institutions of Soviet power about Nazi war crimes, in order to use them as one of their long-term tools in the ideological and political struggle for the future of postwar Europe and the USSR.” The foreign objective was why soon almost no government and party officials were part of the commission’s staff.90 That the Extraordinary State Commission did not, or at least not primarily, mean to inform or convince Soviet citizens of anything helps explain why publication of its findings (as booklets and press articles) began only in April 1943, and why fully half of its reports—including those on Crimea, Moldavia, western Ukraine, and Leningrad—never appeared at all.91 In 1943, the Extraordinary State Commission issued eight reports about killings where Jews had been among the civilian victims. These related to the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) (four towns in Smolensk and Kalinin oblasts, Krasnodar, Stavropol´ krai, Orel oblast, and Smolensk) and to Soviet Ukraine (Kup˝ians´k, Stalino oblast, and Kharkiv).92 In general, the reports, as Amir Weiner has put it, “outlined a long-standing pattern in establishing the myth of the war. The suffering of the civilian population at the hands of the invaders was universalized, ruling out any ethno-national distinction.”93 Thus they severely underplayed the extent of Jewish suffering and death. There were only a few exceptions. The following was reported about the German military commander of the town of Sychevka in Smolensk oblast: “On 7 January 1943, he chased together about 100 Jews—women, elderly, and children. First he beat them up, then he took them to the city outskirts and shot them.”94 According to the August 1943 report about Stavropol´ krai: “It has been established that the German occupants carried out with incredible hatred a bloody slaughter [krovavaia boinia] of the Jewish population of the city of Kislovodsk.” Some 2,000 had been taken by train to Mineral´nye Vody, walked to an anti-tank ditch, and shot there on 9 September 1942. Also shot there were “thousands of Jews” from Essentuki and Piatigorsk. An exhumation supposedly conducted by the writer Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi had produced a body count of 6,300 “Soviet citizens.”95 In “The Brown Drug,” a long Pravda article of his own published on the

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 103

same day as the Extraordinary State Commission report, Tolstoi also was very clear: “In the North Caucasus, the Germans killed the entire Jewish population, most of whom had been evacuated during the war from Leningrad, Odessa, Ukraine, [and] Crimea.” He added that the “Germans began preparing for the mass murders from the very first days of the occupation.” Quoting various survivors and witnesses, he told a horrific tale of shootings and gas-van murders of Jews and a limited number of Russians. He admitted his lack of understanding: “How could the German people fall so low that its army committed acts that humanity will remember for a thousand years with loathing and horror?”96 Perhaps decisive in these reports about the region was Tolstoi’s standing with Stalin as a member of the Extraordinary State Commission and as a writer similar to Ehrenburg in both his usefulness to Soviet propaganda and his popularity.97 It is worth noting here that one month into the war, he had already written in Izvestiia that Hitler had won the support of the “petty bourgeois” through antisemitic agitation and that he wanted to “exterminate the peoples that he does not need.”98 From early 1944 on, the Extraordinary State Commission issued reports on the death camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau (discussed below) as well as reports dealing in whole or in part with killings of civilians including Jews: one specifically on the extermination of Soviet citizens and POWs; two dealing with the RSFSR (on Novgorod oblast and Karelia); four on Soviet Ukraine (on Kiev and the oblasts of Rivne, Odessa, and L´viv); one on Minsk in Soviet Belorussia; and one each for Soviet Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.99 Five of these eleven reports could have mentioned Jews but failed to do so. The first of them concerned Nazi crimes in Kiev. On 25 December 1943, Shvernik asked the leader of Agitprop, the philosopher Georgii Fedorovich Aleksandrov, to approve the long draft report. Agitprop returned the draft on 8 February 1944, six weeks later. Editorial comments replaced “Jews” (already mentioned late and briefly in the text) with citizens (grazhdane). For three weeks, other high-ranking readers such as Khrushchev weighed in.100 The approved version read, “On 29 September 1941, the Hitlerite bandits chased thousands of peaceful Soviet citizens to the corner of Mel´nyk and Doktorivs´ka Streets. They brought them to Babi Yar, took away all their valuables, and then shot them.”101 The reports about Novgorod oblast, Karelia, Odessa oblast, and Estonia also omitted Jews entirely. The Soviet Estonian report of November 1944, for example, described the hasty murders committed at the camp at Klooga just months before but provided no ethnicity for the 2,000 victims, who in reality were mostly Jewish. (Perhaps this was not known then.)102 The other six reports mentioned the Jews in some way. The “Report on

104  karel c. berkhoff

the Directives and Orders of the Hitlerite Government and German Military Command concerning the Extermination of Soviet Prisoners of War and Civilians” appeared in March 1944. “Preliminary data,” it stated, showed that “about two million” Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs had been murdered, gassed, or tortured to death. The report cited and included partly as facsimile Reinhard Heydrich’s guidelines of 29 October 1941 on the “isolation” of the “Soviet Russian intelligentsia and Jews, in so far as this concerns professional revolutionaries or politicians, writers, editors, Comintern officials, and so on.”103 The report on Rivne oblast, published in May 1944, quoted a witness of open-air shootings referring to “Soviet citizens—Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Jews.”104 The report on L´viv oblast (December 1944) described the suffering and death of the Jews of L´viv, including the Jewish ghetto, partly in a statement by a French witness. Immediately thereafter came this passage: “During the ghetto’s existence from 7 September 1941 to 6 June 1943, the Germans exterminated over 133,000 people, some of whom were shot in the ghetto itself, others in the Ianovs´kyi camp, and the remainder sent for extermination to the German death camp in Bełżec [Bel´zets] (Poland).”105 The September 1944 report on Minsk described the SS camp of Maly Trastsianets (Rus. Malyi Trostinets) and failed to mention the Jews—but did mention Jews in another context: “The Germans kept up to 100,000 Jews in a ghetto camp in the western part of the city of Minsk. . . . The assistant commandant of the ghetto camp, Gottenbach, drank toasts to the annihilation of the Jews and forced the doomed people to sing and dance and personally shot prisoners.”106 The report on Lithuania of December 1944 was deceptive about the extent of Jewish suffering but mentioned Jews with regard to the city of Kaunas, albeit last in a line of victims.107 Finally, the report on Latvia of April 1945 omitted Jews in places but contained a remarkable section titled “Massacre of the Jewish Population of the Latvian SSR by the Germans.” It could not have been more explicit: “From the very first days of the occupation, the Germans began to massacre the Jewish population of the Latvian republic.”108 These Extraordinary State Commission reports notwithstanding, the publication in Trud in October 1944 of a speech by Shvernik’s successor as trade-union leader, Vasilii Vasil´evich Kuznetsov, was more typical of Russian-language media reports after 1942 concerning Soviet Jewish victims. Speaking to a British audience about “special cruelty” by Germans against people “merely because they were free Soviet citizens,” Kuznetsov stated: “In every [Soviet] population point there are mass graves where lie the burned corpses of hundreds and thousands of completely innocent Soviet citizens

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 105

who were tormented and killed. In every village you can see terrible places of torture and death, from where no one sent there ever came back alive. Ukraine and Belorussia, Moldavia, and other places where the Hitlerite cutthroats spent time were flooded with the blood of completely innocent women, children, and elderly people. Millions and millions of Soviet citizens fell victim to the Hitlerite terror.” In Kiev they had murdered almost 200,000 and in and around Minsk almost 300,000, he said. The speaker did not mention Jews.109 Thus some Extraordinary State Commission reports referred to Soviet Jews, and the Russian papers published some reports by other prominent figures such as Tolstoi. The general trend of reports about Soviet Jews after 1942, however, was omission of the words “Jews” and “Jewish.” Although Soviet readers read and heard several times in 1943 and 1944 about murdered Soviet Jews, they probably understood that it was unwise to talk about them.

The Murder of Jews in Poland In 1943 and 1944, a lack of media attention to Soviet Jews coexisted with increasing publicity about non-Soviet Jews. To begin with, TASS issued without comment a two-sentence item on 12 March 1943: “As the Reuter agency reports, the English minister of foreign affairs, Eden, has told the House of Commons that to judge from available reports, the mass murders of Jews in Poland are not stopping. Eden added that a large number of people belonging to the Polish and Yugoslav nationalities are also subjected to mass extermination.”110 In April 1943, Nazi Germany publicly launched an investigation into the mass graves of Polish victims of the NKVD found in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. It simultaneously initiated a comprehensive propaganda campaign against “Jewish Bolshevism.” The Nazis wanted to discredit Moscow in the eyes of the Western Allies but seemingly timed the announcement of their discovery (which they had made late in 1942) to drown out British and American media reports of the imminent German destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and the killing of its last inhabitants.111 Indeed, almost at the same time, Jews in that ghetto rose up against their killers. The Katyn affair produced, on 16 April 1943, a denunciation by the Sovinformbiuro, personally modified by Stalin, of the “Foul Fabrications of the German-Fascist Henchmen”112 and, in January of the next year, the longest and most deceptive of all Extraordinary State Commission reports.113 It also, as Yitzhak Arad has argued, sparked a small increase in Soviet media attention to the Jews. The Soviet press reported that Jews were being deported to “certain death” in Poland, and that in Bulgaria, “this organized destruction of the Jews is calling

106  karel c. berkhoff

forth indignation among the Bulgarian people.”114 An editorial in Pravda on 19 April expressing anger against “Hitler’s Polish accomplices” who wanted to investigate Katyn spoke of atrocities against the “defenseless peaceful population, especially Jews.” Aware of the “enormous anger of all progressive humanity” about these atrocities, the “Hitlerites” were “trying with all their might to turn light-minded and naïve people against the Jews. For this purpose, the Hitlerites invent some mythical Jewish ‘commissars,’ who allegedly participated in the killing of 10,000 Polish officers.” It was analogous, Pravda said, to the Nazi lies in 1941 about NKVD victims in L´viv. A separate TASS item made it known to the world—Soviet citizens knew this already—that the editorial reflected the opinion of the Soviet leadership.115 Pravda also carried an explicit article about the Jews of “European countries.” I. Sergeeva reported on 21 April that Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign minister-in-exile, had said earlier that year that Germany had officially admitted to the disappearance of 1,600,000 Polish Jews. She commented, “The German barbarians see their task as completely exterminating the entire Jewish population of not only Poland but also the other European countries.” Sergeeva gave a long quotation from an underground Polish radio report about Treblinka, thus making what was most likely the first published Soviet reference to the camp. Efficient killing of “people” with “steam” was taking place there, she said. Yet she concluded by calling the people killed in Poland Slavs, as if there were no more Jews to kill. This went on “day in day out, according to a plan, with premeditated intent, fully in accord with the misanthropic theories about the extermination of the Slavic peoples.”116 This proclamation—that Europe’s Jews and the Slavic peoples were all suffering from the same extermination—may have been the author’s sincere if mistaken opinion. Already a few times in 1941, the Soviet media had reported starvation and other cruelties imposed on Warsaw’s Jews.117 Late in May 1943, small items in Pravda said that the “Hitlerites had decided to erase the ghetto from the face of the earth and to kill the hundreds of thousands of people who are on the inside.” They had been meeting fierce resistance for a month. The “surrounded people of the ghetto are fighting with great bitterness; they lack arms, and they take up stones; they blow up buildings that German gendarmes enter; they have turned the ghetto into a fortress. Many German gendarmes and Gestapo men have already found their death in its siege. The Polish population is helping the Jews in the fight against the common enemy.”118 The media attention in April and May 1943 to the Jews in Poland probably came about mainly because Stalin reasoned—and not without cause—that the Western Allies would not tolerate challenges to the moral superiority of

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 107

the anti-Nazi alliance. He tried to alienate the Western Allies from the Polish government-in-exile by allying it with antisemites.119 Indeed, in the case of Ukraine’s Vinnytsia, similar but lacking a recognized government-in-exile, a Soviet response was slow in coming. A public Nazi investigation of and propaganda campaign about the NKVD mass graves there began in late May 1943, accompanied by another wave of antisemitic propaganda, but only in August 1943 did the Sovinformbiuro deign to respond to the “next provocation from the fascist cannibals,” blaming “German butchers” for the Vinnytsia graves.120 On 24 July 1944, the Red Army for the first time liberated a Nazi death camp—Majdanek near Lublin. It had been mentioned in passing before at least once: “In the concentration camp in Majdanek [Maidanik], at least 200 people die every day,” a review of the foreign press by A. Aleksandrova in Trud had reported in January, adding that the “prisoners are killed in gas chambers.”121 The Russian Jewish writer Vasilii Semenovich Grossman was available, but although he provided, on 6 August, the first published reference to Sobibór (Sabibur)—as part of a report on both the “massive mechanized murder of the Jewish population of Poland” and the “concerted, gradual extermination of the Poles”—to replace him at Majdenek Moscow sent in the less suspect writer Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov.122 Simonov’s article “Extermination Camp,” serialized in Krasnaia zvezda on 10, 11, and 12 August and read out on the radio on three evenings at 8:40 pm, defined it as Europe’s largest death factory. The word Majdanek was absent; the author followed official Nazi usage in naming the camp after Lublin, the city of which Majdanek was a suburb. He called it so frightening that years of study would be required. Large numbers of Jewish prisoners began arriving in the spring of 1942, he wrote—first from Lublin and nearby ghettos, then from Czechoslovakia, Oświęcim (Osventsim, Auschwitz), and Warsaw. In discussing the mass shootings of 3 November 1943, however, Simonov did not mention that all 18,000 victims (an accurate figure) were Jews.123 (See also the statement: “We know of such places as Sobibór [Sabibor] and Bełżec [Belzhets], where trains brought people condemned to death along a narrowgauge track to an empty field located in a remote corner, where they were shot and burned.”) The writer stated that most of the dead were Poles, followed by Russians and Ukrainians and an equally large group of Jews from throughout Europe.124 Today’s estimate is that 20,000 non-Jews, mostly Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians, and many more Jews—60,000—were murdered in the camp.125 Overall, however, the description was remarkably accurate for its time, certainly compared with other Soviet reports. The long eyewitness accounts in other papers, accompanied by vivid pho-

108  karel c. berkhoff

tographs, mentioned the Jews not at all prominently. Kriger in Izvestiia called Majdanek a death factory, which “distinguishes it from all other German camps for prisoners of war and prisoners that we saw up to now in three years of war.” There people were gassed and killed “without distinction of nationality, religion, conviction, sex, and age.” During 1943, these were “Russians, French, Serbs, Dutchmen, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Greeks,” and more.126 Pravda’s special correspondent Boris Leont´evich Gorbatov had more questions than answers about the why of the camp, but he knew that “only Germans are capable of this.” Hitler evidently aspired to “exterminate everything humane in occupied Europe.” The survivors he quoted had also been in Dachau, Buchenwald, and even Auschwitz (Os´ventsim), but they called Majdanek worse.127 There were ample details about the gassings, the sorting of victims’ clothes and shoes, and sadistic tortures. One man from Lublin, Gorbatov reported, had seen how an SS man with a baby face crushed a young Jewish man with a 60-kilogram pipe. He mentioned among the victims Jews from Warsaw and Lublin. Gorbatov’s manuscript had named 17 nationalities incarcerated in Majdanek, including Russians and Germans but excluding, for some reason, Jews, Ukrainians, and Belorussians. When Shcherbakov received the text from Pravda’s editor-in-chief Petr Pospelov for review, he added all of them to the list (and struck out the Turks and Chinese).128 The publication mentioned the Jews third, after Poles and Russians. This archival find suggests strongly that even as late as August 1944 there was no top-level decision, in writing or not, to omit Jews completely from media reports about the victims of the Nazis. Further Soviet reports about Majdanek support this conclusion. When a Polish-Soviet commission was founded to investigate the place, TASS completely omitted the Jews from its brief items about it, but Izvestiia did not remove them from the translated text of a Polish press communiqué.129 On 16 September 1944, the long commission report was released. It emphatically declared Majdanek a “place for the mass extermination of various nationalities of Europe,” of whom only some were “Jews brought from various ghettos set up by the Gestapo in Poland and various cities of Western Europe” (and not, this implied, Soviet Jews). Through shooting and gassing, “about 1.5 million” people were killed at Majdanek, including a “large mass of Jews.”130 The report also offered the first elaborate official Soviet statement since December 1942 about Nazi extermination in Europe in general. The “Hitlerites” were using “concentration camps” in Poland—“in Lublin, Dęblin, Oświęcim [Osventim], Chełm, Sobibór [Sabibur], Biała Podliaska, Treblinka [Treblinka], and other places”—to murder “people it held to be undesirable, in the first place the intelligentsia of the occupied countries of Europe, So-

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 109

viet and Polish prisoners of war, and Jews.” It had all begun with anti-Slavic plans: the “mass extermination of the civilian population of the countries of Europe, including Poland and the occupied oblasts of the USSR, constituted a policy of Hitlerite Germany that derived from plans for the enslavement and extermination of the leading and active part of the Slavic peoples.” The placement in Poland of these “extermination camps” had been meant to conceal the crimes. Only then did the authors say, as if this was secondary, that “these camps, including the ‘extermination camp’ in Majdanek, were also the place for the total annihilation [pogolovnoe istreblenie] of the Jewish population.” Editorials in Pravda, Izvestiia, and Trud also added “and Jews” to the list of Majdanek’s victims.131 The point here, however, is that despite a transparent effort to deemphasize the Jews murdered in Poland, they were not always omitted. A December 1944 report on a trial in Lublin about Majdanek also mentioned that in just three weeks in the middle of 1943, 40,000 Jews from Warsaw had been gassed there.132 In Auschwitz-Birkenau, about 1,000,000 Jews and 100,000 others, mainly Poles and Gypsies, were murdered. The first public Soviet report naming Oświęcim/Auschwitz appeared on 10 March 1943, well after the first reports in the British, American, and underground Polish press. “Thousand of Polish patriots” had been sent to the camp in Auschwitz (Osvetsim), TASS reported. There were executions every day and six “special ovens” had been built to dispose of the dead.133 TASS reported early the next month that almost 3,000,000 “men, women, and children” had died from “hunger and epidemics” in camps in Poland. Of these, tens of thousands of Poles, “blamed, as a rule, for being a member of the Polish nation,” perished in concentration camps such as Auschwitz (Osvietsim).134 Then, on 14 April, possibly to focus on Jews in view of the Katyn affair, Pravda reported the news it said Reuters in London had received: the “Hitlerites have started to ‘liquidate’ the Jewish ghetto in Kraków by exterminating its population. Agents killed over 1,000 Jews within three days, and they are sending the rest on trucks to the concentration camp in Auschwitz [Osventsim], where they are put to death with gasses and electric current.”135 The next year, reporting from Lublin on 24 October 1944 while giving escaped inmates as sources, TASS mentioned Auschwitz’s Jewish victims again, probably for the first time since April 1943. “From all corners of Europe,” the report went, “the Germans take tens of thousands of people of various nationalities—Czechs, French, Poles, Jews, and so on—to the camp of Auschwitz [Osventsim], with the aim of destruction. The Hitlerite cannibals also direct Soviet POWs here.” Although this suggested nothing particular about the treatment of the Jews, the report added that the Nazis “scoff espe-

110  karel c. berkhoff

cially at Jews; during the ‘check’ they must kneel with their arms in the air for hours.”136 In November 1944, the War Refugee Board at the Executive Office of the President in Washington, DC, published a 55-page mimeographed report entitled German Extermination Camps—Auschwitz and Birkenau. It included the testimonies of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, two Slovak Jews who had escaped earlier that year, and specifics about the gas chambers and the numbers of Jews murdered in them since April 1942. The New York Times of 26 November quoted extensively from it.137 On 29 November, Pravda and other Soviet papers, citing TASS from New York, also wrote about and quoted from the American report, even on page 3 instead of 4. The text left little to the imagination: In the course of about two years, 1,700,000 Jews were killed with poison gasses. . . . At the moment, there are active in Birkenau four crematoria, consisting of ovens, gas chambers, and auxiliary rooms. Every day, 6,000 corpses pass through the crematoria. At Birkenau, as at Majdanek, groups of prisoners are locked in a hermetically sealed room. Thereafter gas is inserted through an opening in the ceiling. Then the corpses are taken to the crematorium and burned. At the opening of the first crematorium in March 1943, high-level guests from Berlin were present. The “program” consisted of the poisoning and burning of 8,000 Jews from Kraków.138

There also appeared at least one item about non-Soviet Jews that did not mention Auschwitz as a planned destination for Jews. Reporting from Washington on 15 July 1944, TASS implicitly dealt with it, however, quoting U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull: “reliable reports from Hungary confirm the terrible news of the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis and the Hungarian Quislings. The scale and form of these beastly crimes are enormous. The entire Jewish community in Hungary, numbering 1,000,000 people, is threatened by extermination.”139

The Last Months of the War The situation changed in 1945. On 2 February 1945, Pravda carried an emotional report by the correspondent Boris Nikolaevich Polevoi from Auschwitz, which the Red Army had liberated five days earlier. It mentioned the selection of new arrivals into those put to forced labor and those—“elderly, children, sick people”—immediately sent to gas chambers. Polevoi gave no explanation for the events at Auschwitz. Now the words “Jew” or “Jewish” were completely absent, as indeed were all ethnic markers.140 Editorials on the occasion of the official investigation into Auschwitz in May 1945 did not

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 111

identify Auschwitz’s victims by ethnicity either. They were simply “over four million people—Soviet citizens [and] citizens of Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, and other countries, including women, elderly people, and children.”141 In January and February 1945, Ehrenburg was still allowed to write in Krasnaia zvezda that the Germans had killed the “entire Jewish population” of all the towns they occupied and that in Germany he saw people of various nationalities but not Jews, for the “Germans killed them all.”142 On 11 April, he could note that “in our country [u nas] the Hitlerites killed not one but millions of innocent Jews.”143 Three days later, Aleksandrov stepped in. He publicly reprimanded Ehrenburg in Pravda, supposedly because he had “simplified” and denounced the Germans as a people.144 The attack taught the respected writer obedience and launched a psychological reorientation of the Red Army.145 It also told all readers that it was no longer the time to mention Jews. The Extraordinary State Commission report on Latvia with its lengthy discussion of the mass murder of the Jews appeared that same month, but this did not lower the impact of the article by the Agitprop leader.

Possible Explanations Throughout the war, Stalin and his associates heard from various sources that the Nazis were deliberately killing every Jew they could get their hands on. The Soviet media often concealed this fact, and for January 1942 it is even possible to document Stalin’s personal involvement in this undertaking. But the concealment rarely became complete and consistent, let alone a policy. Statements by Soviet Jews that passed the censor for Russian-language publications did say, if not always emphatically or emphatically enough, that all the Jews of Europe were being killed. From early 1943 until early 1945, the media rarely identified Soviet Jewish victims as Jews, but Jews remained visible in various items, published documents, and investigative reports. Moreover, by that time, Europe’s other Jews in a sense replaced them; the Soviet Russian-language media often identified Jewish victims beyond the Soviet Union as Jews, as in items about Majdanek and Auschwitz. They also mentioned the other death camps and the Jews murdered there. With all these camps, it took some time for a standard Russian transliteration of their names to evolve.146 The main Soviet media did not highlight the Nazi killing campaign against the Jews and indeed, from today’s Western perspective, “buried” it. Most articles mentioning Jewish victims were small and located on page 3 or 4. Moreover, reports hardly ever explained the importance of antisemitism in Nazi racism. The media coverage of the mass murder of the Jews was also

112  karel c. berkhoff

pale compared to at least one non-Russian-language Soviet periodical. The Soviet Yiddish-language newspaper Eynikayt, as Arno Lustiger and Dov-Ber Kerler have found, during the war often wrote about the Nazi mass murder of Jews, be they Soviet or non-Soviet.147 For example, it carried an article by Grossman stating, “the Germans have exterminated a whole people in Ukraine—one million children, women, and old people, for the sole reason that they were Jews.”148 To place the contrast in proper perspective, we need studies of the Soviet newspapers that were published in Polish and German. Initial findings suggest that these too, were more explicit about Jews than the Soviet mainstream. Wolna Polska (Free Poland) published the call for help from the Warsaw ghetto insurgents.149 Freies Deutschland (Free Germany) described how, in November 1941, Heinrich Himmler, dissatisfied with the number of Jews shot by the SS attached to Army Group Center, ordered his subordinate there to follow the practices at Army Group North.150 It is important to keep in mind that the main Soviet media were not created or used to bring “news.” Hence they “buried” many important developments, if only because of a tremendous lack of space, particularly later in the war. Lengthy items by and about Stalin, tedious economic reports, and lists of awardees took up the limited space. So did numerous items about the nonJewish victims of the Nazis and their allies. For example, the invader deliberately starved to death 1,000,000–1,300,000 people in Leningrad, about half of its population.151 They also deliberately starved occupied Kiev, Kharkiv, and other cities.152 It was proper that from early 1942 on, the Soviet media publicly pointed the finger at Berlin for causing such deadly famines. Having captured the relatively unimportant “Green Folder” of June 1941 (which implicitly approved the starvation policy to which leading Nazis had agreed), Molotov and others discussed it beginning in April 1942.153 Unprecedented “mass extermination of the population” was taking place: according to Krasnaia zvezda in early July 1942, the “Germans have condemned the population of the occupied oblasts to extinction.”154 This was not an exaggeration, even if it referred only to non-Jews, and there was good reason to raise the alarm. When the August 1942 issue of the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps stated that “our duty in the East is not Germanization in the former sense of the term—that is, to impose German language and laws on the population— but to ensure that only people of pure German blood inhabit the East,” the Soviet media were justified in providing an accurate summary of this article almost immediately.155 Referring to the same magazine, the article “Hitler’s War of Extermination” by one A. Leont´ev in Pravda in July 1943 described Nazi killings and enforced famine. Conquering the world through extermination had been a goal of the Nazis from the beginning, but today they were

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 113

“making haste to physically exterminate the population of the conquered lands, so that the Allies go to the cemetery of peoples.”156 Jews should have been mentioned as the most severely threatened, but otherwise, the article was accurate. The Soviet media also often used “death camp” (lager´ smerti) for camps known today as concentration or POW camps.157 Western historiography and public culture has generally reserved this word for camps such as Sobibór, but it actually describes well many of the camps for non-Jews. For example, near the southern Belorussian village of Azarichi (Rus. Ozarichi), the retreating Wehrmacht organized seven open-air camps for one week in March 1944. There it kept, and ultimately abandoned, old, sick, and very young people. Thus it killed perhaps 13,000 non-Jews, mostly Belorussians. It was only proper that articles and an Extraordinary State Commission report were devoted to Azarichi and that they called it a death camp.158 We need to study the reporting about such cases (and of massacres elsewhere in Europe) and establish the tendencies, if any, in terms of the ethnicity of the victims. Comparing Soviet Russian-language reports about the mass murder of Jews with wartime British and American journalism reveals significant similarities. Like the Soviet media, American newspapers and BBC domestic radio also tended to universalize the victims of Nazi crimes.159 Of the 26 front-page stories about the persecution and murder of the European Jews in the New York Times from September 1939 until May 1945, only 6 identified them as the Nazis’ primary victims.160 A difference, however, was that positioning articles on the back page hardly mattered in Soviet newspapers, as opposed to their Western counterparts. The back page (and the end of radio broadcasts) was the normal position for items about foreign countries. Most Soviet citizens realized that important issues might be “hidden” somehow. They also read and listened between the lines. In all, the conclusion here should be that if Soviet readers and radio listeners wanted to know, they were able to find references to a campaign of mass murder specifically directed against the Jews. Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Soviet media, even if widely mistrusted, at least partly helped make Jews and non-Jews alike realize that the Nazis were killing all Jews. During the battle of Kursk in 1943, a Jewish refugee from Poland visited a neighbor in a town in the Kyrgyz SSR for a chat. The man looked up from his newspaper and cried out, “You see what Hitler is doing to the Jews!” (He was pleased: his eyes were “shining with delight.”)161 The next question is how to explain the nature of the reporting about Jews in the Russian language. Communist ideology can provide at best a small part of the answer. This ideology wanted the Jews to assimilate in the

114  karel c. berkhoff

long run, but well into the war it was acceptable to refer to evreiskii narod, the Jewish people.162 Kostyrchenko and Arad consider the relationship with the Allies to have been crucial. Just to placate the British and Americans, they write, the Soviet media occasionally referred to the murder of the Jews.163 This factor cannot fully explain everything, but it probably did play its part during the Katyn affair. One can also speculate that the Soviet media referred to a report about Auschwitz by the office of the U.S. president with the aim of bolstering in turn the credibility of Soviet reports to the Allies.164 By the same token, the absence of a perceived foreign (and domestic) constituency probably helped produce the seemingly total silence about the mass murder of the Roma and Sinti. To the Kremlin, the Gypsies, subject to the “same massive extermination” as the Jews (as Stalin was told in 1943), were politically worthless. A major part of the tentative answer to the question should be antisemitism, both within the Central Committee and as a mindset among Soviet citizens. It has left a small but revealing trail in contemporary archival documents and postwar recollections. Already in May 1942, Ehrenburg wrote curtly in his private notebook of “antisemitism among party bureaucrats.”165 There was talk among party members that Jews were too prominent.166 In August 1942, a Central Committee official named Bol´shakov proposed barring the actress F. G. Ranevskaia from Sergei Eisenstein’s forthcoming film Ivan Groznyi (Ivan the Terrible) simply because of her “prominently” Semitic face.167 When some of Bol´shakov’s colleagues attempted to remove Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeev as chair of the Writers’ Union by listing “politically dubious” employees of the newspaper Literatura i iskusstvo, most of them had Jewish names.168 Jews continued to be barred from diplomatic service, as they had been since 1939.169 Many Jews were dismissed from positions during the war, such as Izvestiia’s editor-in-chief, L. Ia. Rovinskii. Indeed, perhaps only the wartime shortage of qualified non-Jews precluded the dismissal of all journalists of Jewish descent.170 Unpublished words were spoken at the Second Plenary Meeting of the Jewish Antifascist Committee about antisemitism in the Soviet hinterland. Ehrenburg even called fighting it the body’s “main” task at hand. In June 1943, the Sovinformbiuro official blamed for allowing this was replaced by N. I. Kondakov, who soon reported to Shcherbakov about the committee’s allegedly “nationalistic line.”171 Kondakov also told Ehrenburg, some time in 1944, that there was “no need to mention the heroism of Jewish soldiers in the Red Army; this is bragging.”172 It was in line with this attitude that the January 1943 issue of the party monthly Bol´shevik carried an article about Soviet war heroes that relegated the Jews to insignificance. Jewish soldiers had not

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 115

been refused awards (on the contrary), but here the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR gave the specific number of military awards received only for Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians. Though in reality in fourth place, Jews were mentioned at the very end of a long, unspecified list of other nationalities.173 Higher up the party hierarchy, Kondakov’s immediate superior Aleksandrov was an important exponent of Russian chauvinism.174 There are various indications that he also disliked all Jews. As early as December 1941, he referred in Pravda to the incitement against Jews but omitted that they were most of the “over 400,000 Germans” evicted from the country.175 In August 1942, he warned the Central Committee (Georgii Maksimilianovich Malenkov, Andrei Andreevich Andreev, and Shcherbakov) that “non-Russians (in particular Jews)” dominated Russian cultural life and cultural journalism.176 In May 1944, he warned Shcherbakov that many students at the Writers Union’s Literary Institute were “anti-Soviet” and identified the worst offenders as Jews.177 In 1947, he wrote to another leading official, Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, despite the evidence to the contrary, that the Nazis had persecuted all Soviet peoples “equally.”178 Shcherbakov’s son recalled never once hearing at home “talk or jokes directed against any particular nationality.”179 Kostyrchenko comes close to calling Shcherbakov antisemitic, identifying him as the “most ardent opponent of the ‘over-emphasizing’ of the Jewish theme in the propaganda,” and even explains, unconvincingly, the long references to Jews in the Extraordinary State Commission reports on L´viv and Latvia by citing Shcherbakov’s illness.180 The head of the Sovinformbiuro certainly carried out antisemitic policies. He told David Iosifovich Ortenberg in the late spring of 1943 that there were too many Jews at Krasnaia zvezda. Ortenburg responded that he in fact was the only Jew there and named eight Jewish correspondents who had died at the front. Shcherbakov dismissed the editor-in-chief in June 1943.181 Two Americans, however, assert that at a party meeting in Moscow later that year, he demanded an end to anti-Jewish purges.182 Most relevant here is that, as revealed above, in 1944 Shcherbakov added Jews to Gorbatov’s article about Majdanek, which at the very least shows that his actions were not consistently antisemitic. In the Soviet hinterland, almost immediately after the start of the war with Germany, one could hear antisemitic comments and epithets. They spread and grew in intensity, due to both the difficult living conditions and Nazi propaganda. Polish Jewish refugees aroused antipathy, partly because of their different looks and their unfamiliarity with Soviet life, as did Soviet Jewish refugees, among whom were officials who drove up market prices.183 It

116  karel c. berkhoff

seems that early in the war with Germany, many non-Jews in the unoccupied Soviet regions somehow fell under the influence of Nazi propaganda, believing the invader was not killing everyone but “merely” Communists and Jews. There was such “hostile” talk (as a Communist Party report put it), along with verbal threats to Communists, at many Moscow factories in early September 1941.184 Reports of the perception that only Jews were threatened, often with verbal approval of the idea, also come from places such as Rostov in August 1941, frontline villages in the fall of 1942, and the village of Belovodsk in the Kyrgyz SSR in 1943.185 In various places, there were accusations that Jews were shirking their duty to fight, often accompanied by physical attacks on Jews; for instance, in Stalingrad as early as 1941 (“You damned Yids, the time of reckoning will come in the end!”) and the Uzbek and Kazakh SSRs in August 1942.186 Important promoters of antisemitism were demobilized wounded soldiers, but they were not alone.187 The Ukrainian writer and film director Alexander Dovzhenko and, apparently, many other writers were furious that Soviet Ukraine’s Writers’ Union was headed by the Jewish-Ukrainian novelist Natan Rybak.188 It seems likely that Stalin concluded that many of his subjects reacted positively to Nazi antisemitic propaganda about Judeo-Bolshevism and the Nazi killings of Jews. If the director of the Tropical Institute ordered Jews dismissed from the editorial board of a journal while saying that “Hitler is throwing leaflets and points out that Jews are all over the USSR,” the Soviet leader must have been even more aware of the appeal to many Soviet citizens of the antisemitic nature of Nazi propaganda and actions.189 Therefore, by early 1942, he probably decided to reduce the risk by limiting the focus on Jewish victims.190 This again reminds one of British and American journalists. Many of them feared that reports on Jews would foment or strengthen antisemitism (a fear shared by many Jews).191 In the words of Peter Novick about the U.S. media: “When downplaying Jewish victimhood was conscious and deliberate, the purposes were hardly vicious: to emphasize that the Nazis were the enemy of all mankind, in order both to broaden support for the anti-Nazi struggle and to combat the charge that World War II was a war fought for the Jews.”192 On 13 August 1942, the Central Committee ordered editors and frontline correspondents to devote the “most serious attention to the gathering and publication of materials about the atrocities and looting of the Germans in the territory occupied by them.”193 To date, in the meager extant Soviet record, no written directive specifically dealing with the media portrayal of the Jews has been found.194 It probably never existed. In early November 1942,

“total annihilation of the jewish population” 117

on the eve of the joint Allied statement about the Jews, a party bureaucrat named Arkin did tell Ehrenburg that “it’s better not to say that the Germans are killing Jews.”195 Verbal statements such as these possibly came also from Aleksandrov and other higher-ranking party officials—but it is unlikely. One reason is the archival record of the Extraordinary State Commission, which also shows inconsistency in the treatment of the issue of killed Jews.196 Another is the nature of the public reporting, which, as argued here, never omitted all references to the mass murder of the Jews and which, on one occasion in August 1944, actually mentioned the Jews as a result of interference by the Central Committee.

6

People and Procedures Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR Marina Sorokina

Translated by David Habecker

O

nce I received a request for information from a well-known British historian of medicine about something virtually unknown in Western historiography—the Soviet academic commission for the investigation of Nazi crimes.1 This inquiry turned out to be the impetus for my investigation into the social history of scholarship during World War II. A preliminary search showed that my colleague was thinking of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR—henceforth the Extraordinary State Commission. A series of reports (soobshcheniia) on Nazi war crimes in Soviet and Polish territory was published under the imprimatur and in the name of this commission in Russian and English in 1943–45. The transformation of the commission into an academic institution in the minds of Western historians most likely occurred because six of its ten titular members were academicians of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The fact that the Stalinist Extraordinary State Commission could be viewed in the West as academic is quite telling and demonstrates just how effective, propaganda-wise, the Soviet leadership was in its choice of who would play the role of public prosecutor of fascism. How and why did the Soviet authorities specifically select representatives of the scholarly elite to present testimony about Nazi atrocities to Western public opinion?2 What 118

people and procedures 119

was the role of these representatives, and what was the level of their genuine participation in preparing the future international war crimes tribunal on Nazism? Finally, what significance did the participation of a sizable group of scholars, from academicians to research assistants, in the work of the Extraordinary State Commission have for the postwar development of Soviet scholarship and the scientific community? These questions were the reason I began examining the investigation of war crimes, which might at first glance seem far removed from the field of the social history of science.3 It became impossible, however, to study these historical and scholarly processes without a firm understanding of the declared and undeclared tasks of the Extraordinary State Commission, its visible and invisible participants, the authors and editors of its final reports, and the ways in which the commission created, collected, and drew general conclusions from the documents it generated. At the same time, it proved rather difficult to find treatments of Nazi war crimes investigations in the USSR in Western, Soviet, and Russian historiography alike.4 After the publication in the late 1940s and early 1950s of the monographs of B. S. Utevskii, M. Iu. Raginskii, and S. Ia. Rozenblit, which were products of the spirit and constraints of that time, subsequent published historical works on the subject tended to be primarily journalistic or legal in nature.5 Even since the ideological break of the 1990s, the subject has been treated mostly in the context of studying the fate of foreign prisoners of war.6 The following account of the creation of the Extraordinary State Commission, therefore, emerged from a search for basic answers about a virtually unknown topic. In discussions with colleagues, the following overview evoked reactions that ran the gamut from enthusiastic approval to complete rejection. The conclusions may be provocative, but it is hoped that the investigation will at least prompt a much closer historical look at the sources discussed.

The War Myth: Sources and Historiography In contrast to Europe and the United States, the historical pedigree of national-level public investigations was equally undistinguished in both the Russian empire and the USSR. In states with hierarchically stratified imperial bureaucracies, such initiatives almost always threatened to backfire against the authorities themselves. Motivated by the instinct of self-preservation, the Russian authorities nurtured and encouraged the civic weakness of unconsolidated “society,” while almost always trying either to outmaneuver or to thwart public initiatives, which presented a threat to them, even if only a potential one.

120  marina sorokina

The first investigative commissions appeared in Russia at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Peter the Great ordered them to investigate various urgent and complicated cases.7 During the imperial period, Russian rulers frequently resorted to use of these institutions, which in function tended to be characterized by their narrow scope and their being entrusted to political appointees. The involvement of such appointees guaranteed that independent evaluations could not take place, even as it promoted the illusion that “society” itself was a part of the investigation. This last circumstance became particularly important during the first quarter of the twentieth century, as Russian civil society became more assertive and as warfare—from bilateral wars to world war and civil war—shook the country on an unprecedented scale. In this period, Russian authorities from across the political spectrum regularly created special organs for the investigation of “enemy” war crimes, such as the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Violations of the Rules and Customs of War, chaired by Senator Aleksei Krivtsov (1915); the Special Commission for the Investigation of Bolshevik Crimes, sponsored by the commander in chief of the Armed Forces of Southern Russia, General Anton Ivanovich Denikin; and the Soviet Commission for the Calculation of the Consequences of the Intervention and the Civil War. Despite radical differences in political tone and organizational arrangements, all these commissions had a common fate: the huge collection of documentary materials they amassed never became a subject of broad public discussion in Russia, and the publications they prepared based on these materials were never released to the public.8 More accurately, the public itself never demanded an accounting of the results of the investigations, either from the authorities or from the commissions, thus silently assenting to the politically motivated raison d’être for these institutions. The history of World War II—or, as it was called in the Soviet Union, the “Great Fatherland War” (Velikaia otechestvennaia voina), usually translated as the “Great Patriotic War”—proved no exception in this list of losses that were forgotten and discarded by the country. Among the many and varied Stalinist political myths that have been gradually destroyed in Russia in recent decades, the “myth of the war” has proved to be one of the most resilient. The myth has not only kept its official position in Russian public awareness and in academic historiography but in recent times has even consolidated its position.9 According to its simple and bewitching logic, everything “ours” consisted of heroes and victims, and everything “alien” was associated with enemies and criminals.10 In its surprising tenacity, the war myth is indebted to the namelessness

people and procedures 121

and anonymity of the elements that give it structure and significance—the unknown soldier (neizvestnyi soldat), the living and the dead (zhivye i mertvye), the eternal flame (vechnyi ogon´), the victorious people (narod-pobeditel´), and so forth. The vast distance separating the myth’s dramatis personae from the lives of real people and concrete events guaranteed that for decades a national amnesia (obshchenatsional´noe zabvenie) would serve as an important element in the political stability of the Soviet regime. One of the immediate participants in the creation of the Stalinist war myth was the Extraordinary State Commission, which was created on 2 November 1942 by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. The commission had broad powers. It had the right to conduct investigations of Hitler’s war crimes and to determine the material damage suffered by the USSR, to coordinate the activities of all Soviet organizations in this field, to reveal the names of war criminals, and to publish official reports on their findings. The wide scope of activity given to the commission testifies to the importance the work of the Extraordinary State Commission had for Soviet party and state authorities. In addition to the 10 active members, plus the commission staff, more than 100 auxiliary commissions operated during the war years in the union republics, autonomous republics, territories, and regions of the USSR. According to the commission’s own calculations, around 32,000 public representatives took part in determining the facts about Nazi war crimes, and more than 7,000,000 Soviet citizens directly collected and prepared documents for the commission, which in turn read through more than 54,000 statements and more than 250,000 protocols of witness interrogations and declarations of Nazi crimes, as well as approximately 4,000,000 documents on the damage caused by the Nazis.11 The documentary evidence collected under the auspices of the Extraordinary State Commission and its 27 published reports were widely used in diplomatic notes produced by the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and at the various Allied peace conferences of the war years. They were the heart of the documentary evidence used by Soviet participants in the international tribunals at Nuremberg (1945–46) and Tokyo (1950), and they continued to be used into the 1960s for numerous Soviet domestic trials, both open and closed, of Nazi criminals and their accomplices. It is important to note that in accordance with article 21 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Extraordinary State Commission materials, like official government documents and United Nations reports, had the status of incontrovertible evidence and were accepted by the tribunal without additional confirmation from these other sources. Despite significant public and political repercussions both in the USSR

122  marina sorokina

and abroad of the Extraordinary State Commission’s investigations of Nazi war crimes, for a long time the commission’s activity could not be studied as a subject of independent historical research. From the moment of its creation, the work of the Extraordinary State Commission and the materials it collected—the commission’s archival fond contains more than 43,000 dela and is housed at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF)— were surrounded by the strictest secrecy. For instance, in 1945 researchers at Sovinformbiuro were not allowed access to them.12 Similarly, representatives of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC) who were preparing their “Black Book” on the Holocaust in the USSR and Poland were given only a small number of materials that had been carefully selected by commission officials.13 Throughout the nearly half-century of the Cold War, the Extraordinary State Commission fond was closed to researchers, although various materials from it were published in collections of documents on the history of the Great Patriotic War, supporting the official Soviet version of events.14 Despite its enormous size, the Extraordinary State Commission archive itself contains relatively few important documents from the commission’s creative laboratory. This scarcity is not surprising, since even right after the war commission officials systematized the collection under the control of the Soviet state security organs. At the same time, a series of politically important commission documents that expose its inner workings remained for many years under the faithful oversight of the main Communist Party archive.15 Here, in the personal fond of Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, are the drafts of several Extraordinary State Commission reports corrected by Andrei Ianuar´evich Vyshinskii, as well as a set of documents about the writer Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi—Stalin’s “golden pen”—that relate to his work for the Extraordinary State Commission.16 Many commission documents are concentrated in the fondy for the secretariats of Molotov and Vyshinskii in the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation. Without question, however, the most complete set of documentary materials revealing the true history of the creation and activities of the Extraordinary State Commission can be found neither in GARF nor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but in the still-restricted Presidential Archive. Additionally, Russian regional archives, which contain the fondy for the local auxiliary commissions of the Extraordinary State Commission, may also contribute many new and important details on this subject. Thanks to the research of Natal´ia Lebedeva on the preparations for the Nuremberg Trials, a short description of the structure and activity of the Extraordinary State Commission appeared in the USSR as early as 1975.17 Years later, in Otvetstvennost´ gitlerovskikh voennykh prestupnikov i ikh posobnikov

people and procedures 123

v SSSR (The Responsibility of Hitler’s War Criminals and Their Accomplices in the USSR), A. E. Epifanov provided a detailed analysis of the role and significance of the Extraordinary State Commission and its auxiliary commissions in the Soviet system for the criminal prosecution of the Nazi aggressors.18 Although these works were certainly innovative, describing as they did the international and legal contexts for the creation and activities of the Extraordinary State Commission, a series of crucial questions remained unanswered even after their publication—questions that had to do with the history of the commission and its significance for the formation and implementation of Soviet Cold War ideology. For instance, why did the Soviet government even need the Extraordinary State Commission? It already had the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformbiuro) and TASS for purposes of propaganda and counterpropaganda. Within the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) it had the Central Administration of National Economic Accounting as an economic organ for the calculation of Nazi damages. In security organs from the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) to the Committee for State Security (KGB), the People’s Commissariat (later Ministry) of Defense and SMERSH (short for Smert´ shpionam! [Death to Spies!]), and the public prosecutor’s office, it had an intricate network of efficient intelligence and investigative organs. Did not the Extraordinary State Commission, to all intents and purposes, merely duplicate the functions of these other state structures? There are other questions. Did the Extraordinary State Commission really carry out independent investigations, or did it just use documents prepared especially for it? Why, despite the enormous mass of materials it collected, did the Extraordinary State Commission eventually publish only 27 small official reports in 1943–45? By whom and according to what criteria were facts and crime locations selected for these reports?19 Why, despite the full political engagement of the Extraordinary State Commission, did its summary document—the “Report on the Conclusions of the Investigation into the Bloody Crimes of the German Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices,” a draft of which was prepared in the autumn of 1945—not receive Stalin’s approval for publication, leaving it to languish in the commission archives?20 Finally, why did the Soviet leadership—which might have made wide and public use of this documentary evidence exposing Nazism for what it was—instead seal up the commission’s archival materials for decades, making them inaccessible even to its own people? These questions all suggest that in reality the commission, in addition to its publicly stated tasks, must also have had hidden goals. In 1994, P. N. Knyshevskii named one of these goals, conjecturing that

124  marina sorokina

the Extraordinary State Commission facilitated a “largely successful attempt to blame Hitler for a portion of the Soviet authorities’ own crimes.”21 Along the same interpretive lines, in 1998 the writer Lev Bezymenskii, who had analyzed the preparations for the Extraordinary State Commission reports on the Holocaust in occupied Soviet territories, confirmed that some of the information published by the Extraordinary State Commission was the result of conscious and purposeful falsification by Stalinist propagandists.22 The first concrete case of such “transferred blame” had been established by 1990: the Katyn affair.23 In fabricating this case in 1943–44, a special subcommission of the Extraordinary State Commission, chaired by Academician Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko, was assigned the dual role of official mouthpiece of the Soviet counterpropagandists, on the one hand, and independent expert and participant in the investigation, on the other. Its role became all the more crucial in 1943, when the Katyn commission uncovered a series of reports by the German High Command about the discovery in occupied Soviet territories of sites where the NKVD had conducted mass executions of Soviet citizens. It goes without saying what serious consequences the “political ricochet” of such revelations could have had for the Stalinist leadership, both at home and abroad. Fearing such consequences, Stalin and his circle did all they could to silence and distort Nuremberg trial evidence dangerous to them. Today, of course, it is obvious that Katyn was far from being the only such case; the Stalinists made widespread use of the same model of erasing crimes in other situations, covered up by the authority of the Extraordinary State Commission and its auxiliary commissions.24 The issues of how widespread this practice was, and who was behind it, are exceedingly sensitive for the Russian public, but the questions deserve in equal measure both a direct answer and solid corroboration.25 Of course, none of this discussion is an attempt to portray the Nazi war criminals and their real accomplices as somehow victims of the NKVD. That is not the point. Russian and foreign scholars are actively searching for the commission’s abundant archival materials, above all as part of reappraising the material, human, and cultural losses of World War II and related problems of restitution. Using the Extraordinary State Commission materials without a clear understanding of the true reasons for the commission’s existence can become a sort of Pandora’s box for historians, with the “Stalinist school of falsification” continuing to determine the agenda of work, invisibly but persistently, just as before.26

people and procedures 125

A “Broad and Authoritative Public Committee, Not Bearing Any Official Character” The idea of creating a special public organ to investigate Nazi war crimes came up in the USSR at the very beginning of World War II, although for a long time the Soviet leadership did nothing about it. On 26 August 1941, the director of TASS (and member of the Sovinformbiuro), Iakov Semenovich Khavinson—who in prewar days had already put forward numerous ideas for the modernization of Soviet propaganda—sent a note to the secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party (and director of the Sovinformbiuro), Aleksandr Sergeevich Shcherbakov.27 In this note, Khavinson proposed the creation of a “broad and authoritative public committee, not bearing any official character,” as a “systematic source of information about Nazi crimes in the occupied territories of the USSR.”28 Such an organ was necessary, Khavinson argued, because the “accessibility and effectiveness of such information abroad depends quite heavily on the character of the source that is disseminating it.” According to Khavinson’s plan, the committee was not only to pass on information it received but was also to engage directly in collecting materials about Nazi atrocities, in organizing the investigative proceedings in certain cases through interrogation of the victims, and in publishing materials it collected. Khavinson said that the main consumer for the future product would be the foreign public, and his proposal was buttressed by reference to the experience of World War I in Europe, when a number of countries created similar committees that consisted of eminent public figures and representatives from the spheres of culture, academics, and law. The Soviet committee, said Khavinson, must similarly include world-famous Soviet scholars, legal experts, doctors, writers, Red Cross activists, and so forth, whose authority and reputation would guarantee in the eyes of the international public that the future committee would be independent in its evaluations, judgments, and conclusions.29 Khavinson’s note was forwarded from Shcherbakov’s secretariat to the director of the Soviet Communist Party’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop), Georgii Fedorovich Aleksandrov,30 who crossed a series of names off the list and wrote in new candidates.31 However, Agitprop’s final verdict, signed by Aleksandrov’s deputy Aleksandr Ivanovich Makhanov on 29 October 1941, stated that the “creation of such a committee at the present time is not expedient.”32 There is no doubt that in the autumn of 1941, a period of severe difficulties at the front, Khavinson’s project was still premature. A seemingly more important reason for the refusal, however, was that the bureaucrats of Alek-

126  marina sorokina

sandrov’s Agitprop—created after the purges of the late 1930s and lacking the cultural and educational veneer possessed by certain of their predecessors— quite simply did not grasp the opportunity they had to influence Western public opinion with psychological propaganda that was free from primitive ideological rhetoric.33 Following the logic of the central party apparatus, the counterpropaganda role of the committee proposed by Khavinson was already filled. The main players were supposed to have been Shcherbakov’s Sovinformbiuro, with its system of anti-Nazi public committees (such as the Jewish and Pan-Slav committees, as well as those for Soviet scholars, women, and youth), together with TASS and the Soviet diplomatic corps. Despite the psychological mobilization of Soviet society for a “Great War” in the late 1930s, the Soviet system of information, propaganda, and counterpropaganda was not ready for struggle with an actual enemy.34 On the eve of the war, when it came to propaganda not only were the population and the army completely disoriented in their understanding of who was friend and who was foe,35 but even the propagandists themselves did not truly understand the forces they faced. During the first year of the war, the Sovinformbiuro had no representatives of its own in foreign countries, not even in allied ones. Only in September 1942 was it decided that foreign correspondents of TASS would unofficially work for the Sovinformbiuro, and only toward the end of the war (in the summer of 1944) was a special Propaganda Bureau for enemy and occupied countries organized within TASS itself, headed by Solomon Abramovich Lozovskii.36 In contrast to the propagandists, the main focus of the Soviet foreign policy establishment was on what would happen after the war. The secret thrust of its activity was directed toward the problem of the postwar architecture of the USSR and Europe, for which Moscow was already drawing up blueprints in the early stages of the war, essentially continuing its prewar attempts to change the map of Europe.37 On 26 December 1941, immediately after the beginning of the Soviet counterattack outside Moscow, Lozovskii, the deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs, sent the State Committee on Defense a letter addressed to Stalin and People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Molotov.38 The letter included a proposal to create two secret preparatory commissions: a financialeconomic one to tally the damage inflicted by the Nazis and set reparations, and a political one to resolve the problem of postwar borders and the political structure of Europe.39 The creation of the financial-economic commission (in Lozovskii’s terminology), the prototype of the Extraordinary State Commission, took place in the winter and spring of 1942 in the inner sanctum of the Council

people and procedures 127

of People’s Commissars of the USSR under the guidance of two of its deputy chairmen—Nikolai Alekseevich Voznesenskii and Aleksei Nikolaevich Kosygin.40 By May 1942, a draft council decree had been worked out, “On the Procedure for Exposing and Registering the Criminal Acts of the German Fascist Occupiers and Their Allies, as Well as the Material Damage Caused by War and Occupation to the Citizens and the National Economy of the USSR.” The draft decree provided for the creation of a state committee to determine the amount of damage caused by the war.41 As is evident from the committee’s name, the “economists” on the Council of People’s Commissars were trying to limit the committee’s scope by allowing it to deal only with the economic aspects of the war crimes that fell within their immediate jurisdiction. When this draft reached Molotov, however, he immediately changed the future committee’s name and invested it with broader powers. From this point on, it was called the All-Union Committee of the Soviet Council of People’s Deputies for the Investigation of the Villainous Crimes of the Nazis and Their Accomplices and for the Determination of the Degree of Damage Caused by the War.42 Undoubtedly, one of the most important motivations for Molotov’s change was an attempt to connect innovative Soviet antifascist initiatives with initiatives taken all across Europe by émigré governments and representatives of countries occupied by the Nazis. These countries were constantly appealing to the Allies with demands to call the aggressors to account. Many of the countries were supposed to become beachheads for the territorial, ideological, political, and economic expansion of the Soviet Union after the war; and during the winter and spring of 1942, the Soviet leaders repeatedly made declarations in their diplomatic notes about the necessity of calling the German government and High Command to account for their war crimes. So it happened that by the summer of 1942, at a time when the Western allies were just beginning to discuss the basics of creating an international commission to investigate Nazi war crimes (the future United Nations War Crimes Commission), the Soviet leadership already had concrete plans for this endeavor. At the same time, as Lebedeva has pointed out, news of these Allied discussions, which were taking place without consultation with Soviet representatives, gave a substantial impetus to the decision to create a separate body within the USSR to investigate war crimes.43 The realization of this idea became so pressing for Soviet leaders that all manner of departments became involved in the undertaking, and the idea ended up being the object of a sort of competition within the Soviet party and state apparatus. Starting in the summer of 1942, the director of Agitprop himself, Georgii Aleksandrov, took up the cause. On 20 July, he sent a packet of documents

128  marina sorokina

to the Central Committee secretaries A. A. Andreev, G. M. Malenkov, and A. S. Shcherbakov, as well as to Molotov. The packet contained a note and the Central Committee’s draft decree on the creation of an Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of the Atrocities, Violence, and Other Crimes Committed by the German Army in the Temporarily Occupied Soviet Territories and for a Tallying of the Damage Caused by the German Fascist Troops to the Population of the USSR and to the Soviet State.44 The commission’s powers in the field of war-crimes investigation essentially duplicated those from Khavinson’s old proposals, but the organization of the new commission was radically different, and in this part of the draft one can sense Aleksandrov’s personal influence. Instead of Khavinson’s imitation of a public committee on the European model, Aleksandrov, who was known for his homegrown patriotism, proposed the creation of a typical nomenklatura body in the Stalinist mold.45 The commission, which was to be subordinate to the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, would include the secretaries of the central committees of the Ukrainian and Belorussian communist parties, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR, the public prosecutor of the USSR, the deputy people’s commissars for internal and foreign affairs, the RSFSR people’s commissars of health and education, the president of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, two economists, and a writer.46 The draft did not specify who would head the commission, but his identity was implied in the way the personnel list was arranged—namely, Shcherbakov. If the Central Committee’s decree had been approved, Shcherbakov would thus have held in his hands the leadership of almost the entire ideological sphere of the country—from the Main Political Administration of the Red Army (Glavpura RKKA), the Sovinformbiuro, and the Moscow City Party Committee to the secretarial staff of the Party’s Central Committee.47 With such a high-profile staff, the commission would have never been able to meet, since its members were scattered about in different corners of the country—especially considering that this was the “bitter summer” of 1942, which saw a terrible retreat on the southern front and prompted Stalin’s “Not one step back!” order. The drafter had been counting on precisely this fact, however, since he was attempting to leave the actual administration of the new commission within the agitprop apparatus, believing it to be merely a run-of-the-mill propaganda organ. The project did not move forward in this form, however. Indeed, it could not have done so, since its sponsor clearly did not understand (or was not informed of) the main reason why the party leadership was so invested in the enterprise in the first place: to give international legal legitimacy to documentary materials that had been both collected and created by the insti-

people and procedures 129

tutions of Soviet power about Nazi war crimes, in order to use them as a long-term tool in the ideological and political struggle for the future of postwar Europe and the USSR. Success in this goal was every bit as significant for the internal stability of the Soviet regime as it was for foreign policy. In the early stages of the war, many organizations were involved in collecting information that exposed the crimes of fascism—from local soviets, the People’s Commissariat of Health, and the Union of Architects to academic bodies such as the Commission on the History of the Fatherland War and the Institute of the History of Material Culture, among others. Essentially, this movement represented a broad, organic, popular initiative, something intrinsically dangerous for the Stalinist regime. By the beginning of 1942, the operations and intelligence divisions of the People’s Commissariat of Defense and the NKVD were given the task of channeling, and later of concentrating into their own hands, information about war crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices. Two documents dated 25 February 1942 marked the beginning of the centralization of information about war crimes: the NKVD decree “On Sending Materials about the Atrocities of the German Fascist Invaders to the NKVD’s Bureau of State Records (UGA),” and the UGA decree “On the Process of Collecting, Tallying, and Preserving Documentary Materials about Atrocities, Destruction, Robbery, and Violence Committed by the German Authorities in the Soviet Territories Occupied by Them.”48 These established that all documents recording crimes, regardless of their origin or the department to which they belonged, were to be handed over immediately to the NKVD’s Bureau of State Records or its local branches, then to the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR SSSR), where a special Great Patriotic War division was created. As a direct consequence of this centralization, supported by the main military prosecutor and the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the USSR, a system developed according to which the NKVD-KGB had total control over all information relating to the issue of war crimes. The only thing lacking in this secretive system was legitimacy for the information it produced. If virtually any kind of product used by the NKVD would suffice for the purposes of concocting domestic trials, the international arena demanded different ingredients, ones better suited to Western tastes and less discredited in the public eye. For precisely these reasons, when it came time to prepare Aleksandrov’s draft, an expert on Western public opinion was called in—former ambassador to the United States (1939–41) and current member of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (NKID), Konstantin Aleksandrovich Umanskii.49 He spent August–October 1942 adapting the draft to fit

130  marina sorokina

the goals of Soviet foreign policy. The joint work of Agitprop and the NKVD was substantially delayed, however. Only on 28 October 1942 did Aleksandrov, Umanskii, and Aleksei Fedorovich sign a third proposal for the creation of the Extraordinary State Commission and send it on to Molotov.50 This proposal was the draft decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, “On the Formation of the Extraordinary State Committee for the Calculation of the Atrocities of the German Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices and of the Damage Caused by Them to Citizens, Public and State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR.”51 The draft gave the party and Soviet nomenklatura even greater representation on the commission (35 members) but also included a number of public figures.52 But while Soviet officials were drafting the future institution, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Lord Chancellor John Simon issued a joint statement on 7 October 1942, declaring their readiness to cooperate in the creation of a United Nations commission to investigate war crimes. This declaration forced the Soviet side to shift abruptly into reverse. Late on the evening of 14 October in Kuibyshev, Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Lozovskii delivered to the Czechoslovak ambassador, Zdeněk Fierlinger, and the Soviet representative of the Comité français de la libération nationale (CFLN), Roger Garreau, the Soviet government’s reply to the collective note it had received on 23 July from the governments of nine countries occupied by the Nazis.53 In this declaration, “On the Responsibility of the Nazi Invaders and Their Accomplices for the Atrocities Committed by Them in the Occupied Countries of Europe,” the Soviet side first officially used the phrase “special international tribunal.”54 On 17 October, Lozovskii sent a special letter to Molotov with the proposal that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issue a special decree creating a Commission for the Investigation and Collection of Materials on the Atrocities Committed by the Nazis in the Occupied Territories of the USSR, headed by a prominent government or public figure and with a staff of ten to twelve.55 He also proposed giving an order through the Central Committee and the State Committee on Defense instructing all institutions to deliver to this commission all materials in their possession having to do with the atrocities committed by German troops in the occupied Soviet territories. On 20 October, Molotov’s secretariat sent Lozinskii’s letter to Vyshinskii, who, judging from subsequent events, seems to have given his approval. When, at the very end of October, the Aleksandrov-Umanskii draft plan finally reached Molotov’s desk, Molotov made some corrections to it along the lines suggested in Lozinskii’s proposal. The “committee” became a “commission,” and “calculation” became “establishment and investigation”; collective

people and procedures 131

farms augmented the commission’s purview; and the phrase “and their accomplices” was added after “occupiers.”56 An expression that Aleksandrov had used throughout the text—the “Russian people and other peoples of the Soviet Union”—underwent a fundamental change in Molotov’s version when the first part of the phrase was dropped.57 Naturally, however, the final and most important correction to the decree that created the Extraordinary State Commission came from Stalin himself.58 On 30–31 October, Molotov met with Stalin.59 Two days later, on 2 November 1942, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, signed the decree. Shortly thereafter, it was published.60 In accordance with the decree, the Extraordinary State Commission received the status of a public commission. Almost all Soviet and party functionaries were removed from its staff, reducing it to just ten people. Practically speaking, the Extraordinary State Commission had recovered its image as a public body, just as Khavinson had suggested back in 1941. The prospect of an international tribunal forced the Soviet leadership to take into account the traditions of Western political and legal culture, despite only superficially imitating their attributes and conforming to Western public opinion standards. On the one hand, the documentary materials that had been (and were being) collected on Nazi crimes in the USSR were supposed to have international legitimacy; on the other, they were supposed to be presented by representatives of Soviet society whose reputation in the West would be beyond question. The personnel roster of the Extraordinary State Commission was meant to reflect its special character as an “export.”

“The Curve of Your Life Is Sloping Upward in Interesting Ways” For the task of translating the materials into the language of propaganda, Stalin selected a colorful assortment of professionals to serve on the Extraordinary State Commission: a trade union leader, the top-ranking politician of a famous and historic city, a female pilot, an Orthodox priest, a writer, a power-engineering specialist, a doctor, an agronomist, a historian specializing in international relations, and a lawyer. Moreover, the last six of these also held the prestigious rank of academician. More specifically, the composition of the Extraordinary State Commission was as follows: Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik (1888–1970), the head of the Soviet trade unions; Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896–1948), the first secretary of the Leningrad city and regional party committees and a member of the Politburo; Metropolitan Nikolai of Kiev and Galicia (whose secular name was Boris Dorofeevich Iarushevich, 1892–1961); Valentina Stepanovna Grizodubova (1910–93), pilot and Hero of the Soviet Union; and six

132  marina sorokina

full members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences—the historian Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle (1875–1955), the engineer Boris Evgen´evich Vedeneev (1884– 1946), the physician Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko (1876–1946), the agrobiologist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976), the writer Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi (1882–1945), and the legal scholar Il´ia Pavlovich Trainin (1886–1949).61 Despite their differences in age, social origin, and education, almost all the members of the Extraordinary State Commission were in their own way upwardly mobile “careerists” who owed their rise on the professional ladder to the changes that had taken place in their respective institutions after the October Revolution of 1917.62 In this sense, they personified the opportunities Soviet power had created for specific people. The St. Petersburg worker Shvernik found himself heading the Soviet trade unions by 1930 and the Nationalities Council of the Supreme Soviet by 1938. In just ten years, the Ukrainian Lysenko went from being an unknown agronomist to president of the All-Union Agricultural Academy. Another Ukrainian, the physician Burdenko, rose in almost the same amount of time from being a provincial doctor to resident Kremlin physician and president of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. Trainin, a Jewish youth with not so much as a middleschool education, was made head of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Law. By the age of 28, the Khar´kov native Grizodubova had become one of the first female pilots, a Hero of the Soviet Union, and holder of the women’s world record for flight speed, height, and distance. Vedeneev, who until 1917 had worked as a rank-and-file engineer, in the Soviet period directed some of the biggest hydropower projects (including Volkhovstroi and Dneprostroi); by the beginning of the war, he was deputy people’s commissar for electric power stations. The writer Aleksei Tolstoi, although he had a certain fame even in prerevolutionary times, nonetheless attained genuine popularity as a “people’s author” only in the 1920s and 1930s, after the publication of his works on the Civil War and Peter the Great. Even the well-known historian Tarle was elected as a full member of the Academy of Sciences only in 1927. All these people enjoyed a good deal of fame in the USSR and frequently appeared in the Soviet press, often side-by-side with the highest party and state leaders and with Stalin himself. The Extraordinary State Commission members had doubtless been chosen because of their absolute personal devotion to the country’s supreme leader, as well as the equally important fact that they had proven that devotion. Even leaving aside high Soviet officials like Shvernik and Zhdanov, Stalin had met more than once with almost all the Extraordinary State Commission members before the war and had directly helped advance their careers.63 Nikolai Burdenko, the highest-ranking Soviet doctor of the time, was

people and procedures 133

part of the special elite of Kremlin medicine in the late 1930s. He personally treated Stalin, members of the Politburo and the government, and Comintern officials. In 1940, he joined the Communist Party. Under the surface of his monumental image, however, lay a medical career that was far from simple. The young Burdenko had been a stereotypical Russian nihilist of the sort described in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Coming from a family with many children, he had received a religious education but chose to turn down service to the church to become a medical doctor. His participation in student unrest at the University of Iur´ev (Dorpat/Tartu) delayed the completion of his degree, and he completed his higher medical education only in 1906, at age 30. In later years, with service on the front lines of the Russo-Japanese War and extensive travel abroad under his belt, he managed with some difficulty to become a professor extraordinary at the University of Iur´ev.64 Only when he was in his forties, in 1923, did he move from Voronezh to Moscow, having been elected a professor at Moscow University. In ordinary peacetime life—where networking played an enormous role, especially in medicine— Burdenko would hardly have been able to rise to the level of resident Kremlin physician. However, in the postwar Russia of the 1920s, which had lost nearly a quarter of its medical personnel during the Civil War, the provincial doctor ended up having a brilliant career in Moscow.65 I might also note that as a consequence of old wounds, Burdenko lost his hearing as early as 1937, and in the autumn of 1941 he suffered a stroke that deprived him of movement and speech.66 An energetic but seriously ill man, Burdenko would serve as the principal medical expert on the Extraordinary State Commission and the chair of its special commission on Katyn. Valentina Grizodubova was the captain of the female crew that in 1938 completed a famous nonstop flight from Moscow to the Far East, and had numerous unofficial meetings with Stalin while preparing for the flight. After it, she was named director of the International Airline Administration and opened the first international routes to Berlin. In the war years, Grizodubova’s agency was responsible for fulfilling a special government order on flights to foreign countries. In addition to directing the long-distance aviation group that took care of special orders for supplying partisan divisions, she headed up the Antifascist Committee of Soviet Women.67 Il´ia Trainin, who in the prerevolutionary years was involved primarily in the “expropriation of the expropriators,” was repeatedly arrested, exiled to Siberia, and deported abroad. In 1920, he came to work for Stalin in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities. He wrote for the journal Zhizn´ natsional´nostei on both theoretical and practical questions that had to do with the nationalities issue. Having demonstrated an ability both to under-

134  marina sorokina

gird and to implement the general policy personified by his boss, Trainin soon found himself in charge of the censorship of literature and theater (as chairman of the Main Committee for the Control of Repertoire, or Glavrepertkom), then introduced order into the administration of the Sovkino film agency (1926–30) and the Communist Academy’s Institute of Soviet Construction and Law (from 1931 on). In 1942 Vyshinskii handed over to him his position as director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Law— making Trainin the country’s highest-ranking academic jurist. Although Trainin had written hundreds of articles on subjects like federalism and international law, his true role—that of the de facto party commissar for scholarship—was a secret to no one.68 His loyalty to the regime, however, did not save him from being dragged through the mud in the postwar years, during the “anticosmopolitan campaign.”69 Tarle—a renowned specialist on French history, international relations, and Russian foreign policy—had such unquestionably high stature that despite his lack of party affiliation he was recruited to join various experts’ committees in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, where he examined significant foreign policy questions for the Stalinist regime.70 At the same time, an event occurred in Tarle’s life that largely determined his subsequent public behavior. In January 1930, the academician was arrested in Leningrad in connection with the notorious Academy of Sciences affair (also known as the Platonov-Tarle affair) and exiled for five years to Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan). After a while, Stalin ordered Tarle returned and restored to the Academy of Sciences. A man of European culture and enormous talent, Tarle was so shaken by these unexpected experiences that in the mid-1930s he became in practical terms the historical mouthpiece for the “great leader of peoples,” providing professional support for Stalin’s geopolitical ambitions. Other careers followed more linear paths. “Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo!” These words, spoken by Stalin in February 1935 at the Second AllUnion Congress of Collective-Farm Shock Workers, decisively paved the way for the long and dizzying career of Trofim Lysenko—academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1939), president of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (1938–56, 1961–62), director of the Genetics Institute of the Academy of Sciences (1940–65), and deputy chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1938–56). Much has been written about how the Lysenko phenomenon was the result of Stalin’s direct patronage.71 The famous writer Aleksei Tolstoi originally had a decidedly negative attitude toward the Bolsheviks and even cooperated with the propaganda bureau of General Denikin’s Volunteer Army during the Civil War (1918–19). Later settling in Paris and Berlin, he actively wrote for the émigré press. This

people and procedures 135

did not prevent him from returning home, however. Having “changed landmarks,” Tolstoi arrived in the USSR in August 1923. From this moment on, he gave himself over to the new regime to such a degree that without a trace of irony he may be called the main court author of the prewar USSR. Like many Soviet authors, Tolstoi quite consciously turned singing Stalin’s praises into the springboard for his success, in return for which he received all the privileges available to Soviet writers.72 In the 1920s, while still the bishop of Peterhof, Nikolai was repeatedly arrested by the political police (OGPU). He somehow survived and from 1927 to 1940 headed the eparchies of Leningrad, Novgorod, and Pskov. In 1940, he became exarch of western Ukraine and Belorussia. At the beginning of the war (July 1941), Nikolai was raised to the rank of metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia. From the summer of 1941 on, for all intents and purposes, he ran the eparchy of Moscow. He attended the most important meetings of Orthodox hierarchs with Stalin during the war years (1943, 1945). When the patriarchate was restored, he was considered a serious candidate for the position of patriarch of all Rus´.73 As one can see from this brief survey of the lives of the commission members, their absolute loyalty to the Stalinist regime was guaranteed by a triedand-true method—a combination of the carrot and the stick. In each of these people’s lives some event had occurred that in the context of totalitarianism made them completely dependent on the state—making it possible for the state, in one way or another, to monitor or even direct their behavior. Finally, let us consider one more circumstance. Stalin named as chair of the Extraordinary State Commission a person who, first, was not publicly connected with the internal purges and trials of the 1930s and, second, had been in charge of the Council (later “Commission”) on Evacuation under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and thus had experienced its many hidden vicissitudes from the inside.74 Stalin accurately saw in the faceless Shvernik a faithful guardian of the most hidden state secrets. Not coincidentally, after the Twentieth Party Congress, and throughout the “Thaw” (1956–66), Shvernik headed the Soviet Communist Party Control Committee (from 1962 on called the Party Commission), a special organ for party security that, together with the KGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, guarded all information about the illegal activities of the Stalinist regime for many years. Nominally each member of the Extraordinary State Commission was responsible for one department (otdel). Trainin led the department that calculated atrocities committed by the German occupiers and their accomplices against Soviet citizens. Lysenko headed the department evaluating damage to collective and state farms. Vedeneev took charge of the department that

136  marina sorokina

assessed damage to industry, transport, communications, and communal agriculture. Grizodubova led the section working on damage to cooperative, trade union, and other public organizations. Finally, Tolstoi, Burdenko, and Metropolitan Nikolai headed the body in charge of calculating damage to cultural, scholarly, and medical institutions, buildings, and religious paraphernalia.75 Additionally, in September 1943 the Bureau of Experts for the Evaluation of the Destruction and Plunder of Objects of Art and Antiquity was added to the Extraordinary State Commission, staffed by a group of experts headed by the artist and academician Igor E. Grabar´.76 In reality, however, the commission members’ oversight was limited by the fact that the commission’s final documents had to be signed. As protocols of the Extraordinary State Commission show, in practice the commission hardly met, and agreement on its protocols was by “survey.” Out of 27 sessions in 1943–44, only 4 involved an actual gathering of the commission members, and these 4 had rather insignificant agendas. The real levers of control over the activity of the Extraordinary State Commission were in the hands of its powerful bosses, who formulated the “political orders,” which the commission apparatus merely implemented. In the war years, the staff of the Extraordinary State Commission (department chiefs and inspectors) numbered approximately 150 people, about the size of a small Soviet people’s commissariat. Although the Extraordinary State Commission department “chiefs” (nachal´niki) were the key figures on the staff, none of them had acquired any professional experience before the war in the area for which their particular department was responsible, much less in questions of international criminal law.77 The personal affairs of the Extraordinary State Commission officials show that their collective portrait comprised the biographical traits that were typical of mid-level Soviet careerists: a lowly social origin; Red Army service in the Civil War; then, as a rule, a flourishing party or Komsomol career in the provinces; and finally, after receiving a higher education at a communist university or party school, a party or economic career in the capital. The central Extraordinary State Commission was only the tip of a multilayered iceberg, the bulk of which was made up of a complex system of local commissions assisting in the work of the central commission from the republic, krai, and oblast levels (these numbered 19 by the beginning of 1944) down to the village level.78 Also forming an integral part of this structure were the numerous departmental commissions that accumulated data on the damage caused to institutions and organizations of various people’s commissariats. The makeup of the regional commissions was fundamentally different from that of the central Extraordinary State Commission. They were headed by

people and procedures 137

teams of three, consisting of the first secretary of the regional party committee, plus the heads of the corresponding local Council of People’s Commissars and the NKVD-KGB, which recruited “public representatives” for work on the commissions.79 No document, however, mandated the participation of representatives of the public prosecutor’s office in the investigations. An analogous model for ancillary commissions was used at the local level. In practice, given how busy the local party and state authorities were, the decision to staff the local commissions in this manner meant that the whole process of gathering firsthand information on the crimes of the Nazis and the damage they caused was directed and controlled by local branches of the NKVD-KGB and SMERSH.

“It Is Time for the Extraordinary State Commission to Get to Work” Organizing the Extraordinary State Commission took more than four months. On 23 February 1943, the draft “Decree on the Extraordinary State Commission” was sent to Stalin, while work on the structure of the commission went to Molotov.80 On 5 March, the Politburo approved the decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party “On the Work of the Extraordinary State Commission.”81 On 19 March, Pavel I. Bogoiavlenskii was confirmed as chief secretary of the commission by a decree of the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars. On 3 April, so were its staff (116 people) and budget.82 But only as the Katyn affair began to unfold in mid-April 1943 did the activity of the Extraordinary State Commission really gather momentum. The Soviet leadership had to energize the commission in response to concern over the political implications of Katyn and the urgent need for a tough response—combined with the need to restore economic, political, and ideological control over territories that had either already been or were in the process of being freed.83 The Extraordinary State Commission reports published in the central Soviet press became the main form through which the commission’s work became known to the public. The reports were compiled in Moscow on the basis of documents (testimonies, statements, etc.) sent to headquarters by the local auxiliary commissions and of materials collected by commission members traveling around the country. The idea was for the reports to appear two or three times a week, but this degree of regularity was never reached. The materials received were so weak in legal terms that their “processors” on the commission needed a lot of time to edit them.84 The party secretaries gave the troika of Vyshinskii, Shvernik, and Aleksandrov responsibility for putting out the reports.85 The procedure for reviewing texts processed by the Extraordinary State Commission staff in-

138  marina sorokina

cluded several stages. First, Vyshinskii and Aleksandrov edited them, then Shvernik sent the documents to Molotov for his approval.86 Stalin made the ultimate decision. In preparing the reports, Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Andrei Vyshinskii (1883–1954) was key. Without his verdict, Molotov did not approve a single Extraordinary State Commission document. Vyshinskii—who had in recent years served as public prosecutor of the USSR and as an experienced manager of the internal political courts in the 1930s, and who would go on to head up the Soviet section at the Nuremburg Trials—soon became the éminence grise of the Extraordinary State Commission and the unofficial chief editor and censor of its reports.87 Shvernik and Aleksandrov understood their secretly delegated roles as extras and gave pro forma approval to the reports on which Vyshinskii had “creatively” worked. Vyshinskii’s resolutions and corrections to the commission’s drafts well illustrate the demands he imposed on the texts. I offer just one example. On 15 August 1943, after studying a draft report on Kursk oblast, Vyshinskii explained with some irritation to academician Trainin a few matters that would have appeared elementary to any legal expert: “You have to say how all these atrocities were established (by a member of the Extraordinary Commission?), whether statements were taken, by whom, when and where they were taken, and so forth. Otherwise this document loses its significance both as document and as legal testimony. Add this and show it to me again.”88 The missing information was never added, and so the report on Kursk oblast remained in the archives. Vyshinskii demanded from the commission staff precision and accuracy in details of the reports that could be easily checked. In preparing the reports on L´vov and L´vov oblast, where many hundreds of thousands of people had been exterminated in concentration camps—including citizens of France, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy, and other countries—he wrote to Shvernik on 15 December 1944: “I consider the publication of this document to be important. But it is necessary to check place names and the last names of the victims, especially those of professors and representatives of the intelligentsia in general.”89 Vyshinskii constantly paid attention to the possible social implications of the reports, as well as their accessibility to the general reader. On 26 August 1944, in a discussion of a text “On the Destruction of Monuments of Art and Architecture in the Cities of Petrodvorets, Pushkin, and Pavlovsk,” he wrote to Molotov: “This is an important document. But it has been prepared in such a way as to make it difficult for a wide readership to understand; and it is not very accessible, since it is weighed down with the names of famous craftsmen

people and procedures 139

and historical events that are given without any explanation, even of the most spartan and elementary sort. I consider it necessary to correct this shortcoming and then allow it to be printed.”90 His boss immediately agreed and returned the document to Shvernik for further revision; only after Vyshinskii gave his final approval on 2 September did the Extraordinary State Commission vote to permit the publication of the report.91 At the same time, Stalin’s former public prosecutor did not hesitate to falsify the facts. The preparation of the report “On the Destruction of the City of Smolensk and the Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders against Soviet Citizens” is revealing in this regard. It served as the immediate precursor to the Katyn affair and in a sense as a dress rehearsal for the way information was stage-managed there. On 4 November 1943, Shvernik sent Molotov the Smolensk text with a request to permit publication.92 After Molotov approved the request, he wrote: “It is necessary to publish this on 6 November. Ask Vyshinskii whether he has any comments.” The message was immediately relayed to Vyshinskii, and the very next day he returned it to Molotov’s secretariat with a number of edits.93 The biggest changes made by Vyshinskii were to the “Testimony of the Group of Experts in Forensic Medicine”—signed by a commission composed of permanent commission experts Burdenko, V. I. Prozorovskii, V. M. Smol´ianinov, P. S. Semenovskii, and M. D. Shvaikova.94 The original testimony had said: “in graves in the villages of Magalenshchin and Viazoven´ko, and on fruit and vegetable farms in the village of Readovka, were found bodies with bullet wounds and with injuries caused by blunt, hard, and heavy objects and bodies without any sign of physical trauma. With regard to this last [type of] body, taking into account the testimony of a number of witnesses, it can be said with a high degree of probability and plausibility that the cause of death was poisoning by exhaust fumes in special vehicles.”95 Vyshinskii’s corrections were terse and decisive: instead of the indefinite phrase “with a high degree of probability and plausibility,” his pencil wrote “it can be confirmed”; to the “testimony of a number of witnesses,” he added “and other data”; and he changed “exhaust fumes” to the more scientificsounding “carbon monoxide.” Finally, he made a point of deleting from the testimony the doctors’ admissions of doubt. These admissions include: “It is impossible to get objective proof that the poisoning was caused by carbon monoxide, the main toxic substance in exhaust fumes, by conducting forensic, chemical, and spectroscopic tests. Such tests clearly cannot be carried out given the advanced decay of the bodies, which were buried more than one year ago”; and “With regard to a certain number of the bodies exhumed from the graves in the above locations, it was impossible to determine the cause

140  marina sorokina

of death in view of the advanced degree of rot and tissue decay in them.”96 Thus in Vyshinskii’s understanding the document came to look like a finished legal product. The Extraordinary State Commission’s forensic medicine experts in this way simultaneously received an object lesson and a set of crib notes for how to prepare documents. Later documents show that they learned their lesson well. Vyshinskii’s tactic of supplying the reports with the necessary propaganda spin was shared by all members of the Extraordinary State Commission, who understood perfectly well what the authorities expected of them. Hence Aleksei Tolstoi, who was in Stavropol krai from June to August 1943, “personally . . . established the facts of monstrous atrocities and the mass murder of peaceful Soviet citizens” and described what he saw in the preamble to the published report.97 His name and reputation put a stamp on the eyewitness statements, affidavits, and testimonies that the NKVD had for the most part compiled before his arrival in Stavropol, which served as the documentary basis for the report. Tolstoi’s personal fond includes a set of copies of the original documents, which on closer examination reveal one of the most widespread tricks for garbling the facts, namely the “technology of substitution.” All the original documents discussed the total destruction by the Nazis of the Jewish population of the krai, but the commission report routinely changed such references to “Soviet people,” “Soviet children,” or “Soviet citizens.”98 All the members of the Extraordinary State Commission shared the goal of unconditionally fulfilling Stalin’s political orders. Just before a meeting of the “Big Three” foreign ministers in Moscow, the Extraordinary State Commission held sessions on 8 September and 14 October 1943, during which the members discussed the need to “speed up and change some of the working procedures” of the commission.99 Tolstoi proposed just such a formulation for the agenda, demanding a simpler way of calculating damage caused by the Nazis and insisting that the members stop quibbling over trivial details in the testimony.100 Academician Vedeneev supported him, arguing for a few compromises in the legal value of the documents. Academician Tarle stated the issue even more transparently and vividly: “We need not worry about anyone arguing or legally debating with us. . . . If we say there were three chickens instead of two, nobody will be able to tell the difference.”101 Tarle, who was cooperating with the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs and was well aware of previous high-level meetings of the Allies, told his colleagues frankly that the government had to have at its disposal something more substantial than statistics on the loss of 300,000 chickens. “Our commission can leave the documents for the future,” he said, “but right now we

people and procedures 141

need our leader to have at the conference detailed material that lends itself to more general conclusions.”102 Of course, at the root of the intentional distortion or falsification of information about the scale and content of the Nazi crimes lay the political will of Stalin himself, which was viewed as a direct guide to action. Already in his first war speech of 3 July 1941, addressed to the army and the population, Stalin declared that all valuable property that could not be carted off must without exception be destroyed. But even such an open position, bolstered later by a series of secret orders and directives, was carefully disguised at the level of ideological propaganda.103 At the same time, the Soviet party and state leadership carefully hid the true material and human costs of the war, either knowingly publishing incorrect data or classifying “inconvenient” information. But if the basic outlines of Stalinist “double-entry bookkeeping” are obvious—one ledger for “foreign” and another for “domestic” use—then the question of when, by whom, how exactly, and why this or that specific information about destruction and losses was distorted, either by being inflated or deflated, must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.104 How parts of Soviet society—at various levels and often for different motives—may have supported and popularized its leaders’ initiatives is an important and intriguing topic for future investigation. The Extraordinary State Commission was abolished by order of the Soviet Council of Ministers on 9 June 1951, and its documents, staff, and budget for 1951 were all given to the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs.105 Nonetheless, the Soviet authorities revived the commission’s public activity for a short time at the very end of Khrushchev’s Thaw, when they needed to conduct a campaign to expose Nazi criminals in the West German government. The last protocol (no. 73) of the Extraordinary State Commission, which de jure no longer existed, was dated 28 March 1960 and devoted to the Theodor Oberländer affair. The Extraordinary State Commission accused Oberländer, the federal minister for refugee affairs in Konrad Adenauer’s cabinet who during the war had been a counterintelligence captain on the Soviet-German front, of war crimes committed in the North Caucasus and Ukraine.106 Nearly a half-century later, we must acknowledge that the Stalinist plan to create a phantom public prosecutor of fascism succeeded. The Extraordinary State Commission fulfilled its representational function during the war, and in the postwar years faithfully kept the topic of war crimes sealed off from Soviet society. The documentary materials it created and collected, however, have turned out to be the latest Russian mass grave. While excavating it, historians will long face the sometimes fruitless task of distinguishing “ours” from “others,” and executioners from victims.

7

An Analysis of Soviet Postwar Investigation and Trial Documents and Their Relevance for Holocaust Studies Diana Dumitru

W

hen Soviet power returned to Bessarabia in the spring of 1944, Petru Lupan, like many other locals, was immediately drafted into the Soviet army.1 The 27-year-old Moldovan quickly deserted the military and went into hiding, perhaps not interested in fighting for his newly acquired fatherland. Soviet authorities had zero tolerance for military deserters, especially when they hid in groups, and Lupan’s arrest was therefore predictable and, to a certain extent, unavoidable. The next thing we learn from the files kept by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) on Petru Lupan’s case is that, in addition to the charges of desertion and armed resistance to his arrest, he was accused of taking part in a massacre committed in July 1941 by Romanian soldiers and a group of Bessarabian gentiles in his native village of Cepeleuți.2 As the police documents assert, about 200 people—“Jewish population and Soviet activists”—fell victim to the massacre at Cepeleuți.3 According to the first minutes of Lupan’s interrogation, dated 16 September 1944, the defendant confessed to taking part in the mass murder of Jews and revealed the names of six other gentiles from Cepeleuți involved in the same crime. Later Lupan changed his initial statement, however, insisting he did not kill any Jews, although he admitted to pointing out Jewish homes to Romanian solders. He insisted he had earlier given false testimony—he “did not know why”—and remained firm in his position until the end of the trial. Despite his plea of innocence, the court decided that Lupan was guilty of 142

soviet postwar investigation and trial documents 143

murder, desertion, and resisting arrest. Lupan received a death sentence and was executed.4 Was Lupan guilty? Did he initially provide false testimony, or was this a “confession” like the ones seen during the infamous Moscow show trials? Did he even change his statement, or was this part of a larger plot with an as yet unknown agenda? Many people look at Soviet trials through the prism of those held during the Great Terror of the 1930s or the East European show trials of the 1950s, with prepared scripts and predetermined outcomes. Viewing post-World War II Soviet trials through such a prism is tempting even for historians, but how reasonable is this assumption? Scholars studying the Soviet Union were the first to point out the problems that Soviet documents pose as primary sources. They warned of various obstacles set up by an indoctrinated, centralized, secretive machine that produced immense but often confusing and misleading paperwork. The reliability of sources poses an enormous quandary for researchers of Soviet history, becoming most acute with materials produced during the Stalinist period. Scholarly convention advises the rejection of Soviet police interrogation records as truthful sources on committed crimes. Studies of Stalinist repression have demonstrated that during the 1930s the NKVD arrested tens of thousands of innocent people on false charges labeling them as “enemies of the people”—foreign spies, anti-Soviet conspirators, wreckers, Trotskyists, or members of counterrevolutionary organizations. The officers then used manipulation, blackmail, and torture to obtain incriminatory evidence from the detainees.5 In 1937–38, when the NKVD violence reached its peak, numerous prisoners were tortured, drowned, and beaten to death.6 As a result, NKVD investigation documents are widely regarded as lacking credibility as a guide to historical events. The same can be said for cases after World War II. For example, during the persecution of the Jewish Antifascist Committee and the concoction of the Doctors’ Plot, a number of prominent Jewish scholars, political and social figures, poets, and doctors were falsely charged with antigovernment activities, treason, and espionage, forced into confessions, and ultimately executed.7 Throughout Stalin’s rule, his repressive apparatus systematically applied physical and psychological coercion to innocent people in cases involving both high-profile defendants in show trials and members of the general public persecuted by extrajudicial bodies (the infamous dvoikas and troikas). The apparatus also fabricated the investigation materials. All these factors should promote skepticism of investigation and trial material produced during this period, but they do not preclude the possibility that some trials were in fact conducted in a professional and legitimate manner.

144  diana dumitru

The Lupan case forms part of a collection of Soviet postwar investigation and trial materials on alleged collaborators, a group of historical sources brought to scholars’ attention in 2005.8 More than 320,000 Soviet citizens were arrested as a result of the state’s effort to punish Nazi and Romanian collaborators in formerly occupied Soviet territories.9 Today these records remain in the former Committee for State Security (KGB) archives, inherited by the secret services located in the various post-Soviet states and for the most part closed to researchers. Copies of several thousand files, however, are available at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC—including cases from Lithuania, Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Given historians’ growing interest in civilian participation in the Holocaust and the current reassessment of collaboration in former Soviet territories, these documents could be of remarkable value, if the information they contain is deemed credible.10 Scholars have a particular interest in many related issues—including civilian violence against the Jewish population, the dynamics surrounding collaboration, the involvement of local auxiliaries in the mass murder of Jews, and the functioning of indigenous administrative units in anti-Jewish policies.11 To what extent are Soviet postwar trial records of use in such research, and how reliable is the evidence they provide? How different or similar are they to other investigative files produced by the NKVD? What can we learn from these materials about the Holocaust? These are some of the questions addressed in this chapter. Tanja Penter has produced the only systematic study of Soviet postwar trial records, and she concentrates on cases that occurred in Ukraine.12 Though Penter does not tackle the issue of document reliability, in general she accepts as credible the factual information they provide, although she underlines the politicization of the idea of collaboration in the USSR after the war. Penter observes that the Soviet regime had an extremely broad understanding of collaboration and provides several examples, such as women tried for cooking or cleaning for SS units or former forced laborers who made comments about the exceptionally good living conditions in Germany.13 She points to the usefulness of personal data about convicted collaborators, deeming those “quite reliable,” even as she cautions that a collective biography of collaborators should take into account the potential impact of Nazi recruitment policies and the Soviet bias in bringing charges against its citizens.14 In dealing with the question of motives for collaboration, Penter argues that “old clichés have to be revised,” revealing that in central and eastern Ukraine, nationalistic feelings were of limited significance in explaining

soviet postwar investigation and trial documents 145

why locals joined police units, while other pragmatic considerations, such as food rationing or the possibility of avoiding forced deportation to Germany, played a significant role in the decision to enter into police service and other related activities.15 Of interest are Penter’s remarks about antisemitism as a motive for collaboration. She asserts that “the entire question of anti-Semitic attitudes was ignored in the trials,” and even the word “antisemitism” was not once mentioned (unfortunately, she fails to indicate in the article how many files she reviewed).16 Penter attributes this neglectful attitude to the regime’s ambivalence toward the revival of antisemitism in Ukraine after World War II and to the ideological suppression of Jewish memory about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.17 My study builds on Penter’s effort by scrutinizing another group of Soviet postwar trial records—those referring to crimes of collaboration in what is now the Republic of Moldova. I aim to analyze the credibility of Soviet postwar trial materials and to outline the possibilities for their use. The main source for this research is 61 dossiers dating between 1944 and 1957 that relate to defendants put on trial for crimes committed against the Jewish population in the territory of what was then the Moldavian SSR (mostly in 1941). Although the files are physically located in Chişinău, I could not access the original collection in Moldova and had to review copies at the USHMM.18 This chapter seeks to answer these questions: How can we trust that Lupan’s case, or any other case related to crimes investigated by the NKVD after World War II, was not fabricated by Soviet security forces or launched in response to a false denunciation? And how can we trust any confession elicited by the infamously ferocious Soviet techniques?

Triangulation with Other Sources One standard approach to verify information is corroboration with other sources, so I begin with this technique. Normally, it is difficult to find relevant historical sources that can establish the truth of a given NKVD file. In these Moldovan trials, I could rely on the USHMM’s Oral History Documentation Project to cross-check some of the evidence. Between 2004 and 2010, the Oral History Documentation Project interviewed just over 200 residents of Moldova (born in the 1920s and the early 1930s, for the most part), who had personally witnessed the murder of Jews in their localities.19 Although Romanian soldiers committed most of the killings, some local gentiles were also involved, and this information is preserved in the oral history accounts. In several extraordinary cases, I managed to locate oral testimony among the

146  diana dumitru

USHMM interviews conducted between 2006 and 2010 that corresponded directly with the NKVD investigations conducted 60 years earlier.20 One of these fortuitous coincidences involved the case of Petru Lupan. The NKVD dossier referring to Lupan’s case gives the following account of the mass murder of Jews from Cepeleuți: in the summer of 1941, when Romanian soldiers entered the village, a group of local gentiles—Lupan among them—offered to lead the soldiers to the Jews’ houses, then personally killed some of the Jews who tried to escape the massacre. The victims were killed in their yards, on the roads, in the fields, in attics, and many other places where they were found; these killings continued even after the Romanian soldiers left. Affidavits in Lupan’s files included the depositions of a villager, Alexei Bacila, who claimed to have been an eyewitness to the massacre at Cepeleuţi. He mentioned seeing Petru Lupan killing three Jews—Bercu Dorfman, Dorfman’s wife, and Iosif Cleiman.21 A careful examination of Bacila’s profile yields some grounds for questioning his impartiality as a witness in this case. First, the files reveal that this man was the one who captured Lupan and brought him to the authorities. Second, one can observe a significant jump in Bacila’s social and occupational position during the investigation. On 8 September 1944, the investigation materials mentioned Alexei Bacila as a tractor driver at a tractor and machine station (MTS); a month later he was deputy head of the Cepeluți village council. Was this promotion a reward for his demonstrated commitment to Soviet power, or were his accusations against Lupan part of Bacila’s strategy to climb the ladder of Soviet power in the postwar environment? The oral history material helped me examine the story of the massacre at Cepeleuți and the accuracy of Bacila’s accusations. Evghenii Televca, a Moldovan born in 1919 in the village of Cepeleuți, spoke to the USHMM about a massacre he had witnessed in the summer of 1941 in his village. He told a story about Jewish men, women, and children from Cepeleuţi being hunted down by groups of Romanian soldiers and local villagers. He mentioned victims killed in houses, courtyards, roads, and bridges—in terms almost identical to those in the NKVD reports. Even the information contained in Televca’s interview about gentiles stealing the property of murdered Jews echoes the NKVD files.22 During the interview, Televca recalled a significant number of crimes, as well as numerous names of victims and their killers. At a certain point during the interview, he also mentions seeing Petru Lupan killing three Jews: “Bercu Dorfman and his wife, and somebody from the Cleiman family.”23 Moreover, Televka named five other villagers, claiming that he personally saw them killing Jews in July 1941. All the names he mentioned were on the list of 14 individuals investigated by the Soviet authorities in relation to the massacre at Cepeleuţi.24 The

soviet postwar investigation and trial documents 147

overlap of Televca’s oral history testimony with the information contained in the NKVD postwar records is striking and adds to the credibility of the NKVD files. The oral history accounts also made it possible to cross-check information about a massacre committed in the village of Scăieni. The NKVD files contain records of Andrei Racu and Efim Stratu. These two locals allegedly participated with Romanian soldiers in killing a group of Jews who were not strong enough to keep up with the Jewish convoy being marched from Bessarabia to Transnistria. As in Lupan’s case, Racu was also accused of deserting the Soviet army and hiding in a forest with a “bandit group” of deserters, “set on killing [Soviet] military and NKVD personnel” while awaiting the arrival of German-Romanian troops.25 SMERSH (shorthand for Smert shpionam! [Death to Spies!]), a counterintelligence unit in the Soviet army, caught and interrogated Racu as early as May 1944, whereas the NKVD arrested Stratu in November 1944.26 Racu confessed to his participation in the murder of Jews, whereas Stratu denied it categorically throughout the trial. Twelve witnesses testified in Stratu’s case. One confirmed that in the fall of 1941, he had been summoned to bury Jewish bodies; and as a result, he happened to be present during the murder. The witness described the episode as follows: several Romanian gendarmes (soldiers employed on police duties among the civilian population), together with Stratu and Racu, were convoying a group of 25 or 30 Jews toward a valley. Once they arrived there, the perpetrators undressed the victims, then shot them.27 Based on the evidence provided in court, both defendants were found guilty. Racu was sentenced to death by hanging, and Stratu to be shot. The interrogation records show that Andrei Racu confessed to the crimes at 3:00 am during a cross-examination that began at 7:25 pm and ended at 4:00 am, 18 May 1944.28 Understandably, this timing raises suspicions that Racu’s confession was coerced. While interviewing people about their World War II experiences, I came across several accounts that referred to torture suffered by those suspected of “anti-Soviet” activities.29 The oral history available on the massacre at Scăieni seems to confirm the assumption of coercion. The hanging of Andrei Racu took place in his native village. By an extraordinary coincidence, one of the USHMM interviewees happened to be present at his execution and even mentioned this episode during his interview. While giving details about the preparation of the gallows and the arrival of the NKVD truck containing the prisoner, the respondent made a passing remark that Racu was in an appalling condition: “He was so tormented that [it was unbearable to see]” (Da el era deamu chinuit, [în] așa [hal] . . . că . . . [nu mai era chip]).30 Another villager interviewed by the USHMM had not personally

148  diana dumitru

witnessed Racu’s execution but knew about it from his wife, another eyewitness to the execution. During the interview, the villager mentioned how Racu appeared to be in exceptionally bad physical condition when he was brought back to the village to be executed: “They [the NKVD] held him . . . until he became so emaciated that he could not talk” (Da 1-o ținut pîn-o slăbit ca deamu nu putea grăi).31 There is a small chance that these villagers were referring to Racu’s spiritual torment in facing execution, but it is more plausible to assume that the villagers had seen signs of NKVD violence against the prisoner. The same interviewees who noticed Racu’s poor physical condition before his execution admitted witnessing Racu murder Jews in Scăieni in 1941. For example, the interview with Mihail Cărăuş, who had been only 13 years old at the time, noted that while tending sheep at the village’s outskirts, he saw columns of Jews—including men, women, and children—being marched by Romanian soldiers. Thirty to forty people were selected from the column and left behind. Since Mihail was not far from the location of the murder, he could see how several Romanian soldiers escorted these Jews to a pit prepared in advance, at which point “Andrei Racu and Evtenii Stratu shot the victims.”32 Except for the perpetrator’s first name, Evtenii, which the NKVD files record as Efim (Soviet official documents are known for their alteration of names that sounded old-fashioned), the description of the episode is similar in both groups of analyzed sources. In addition, Cărăuş mentioned that another villager from Scăieni—Anton Racu—was also involved in the killings on that day. Although I encountered this name in the NKVD files, I could not find a separate dossier on the case of Anton Racu.33 Fiodor Rotaru, the second interviewee who spoke about the murder from Scăieni, was only 11 years old in 1941. He also gave evidence about the killing and robbing of the Jews who lagged behind the convoy. Rotaru also recalled that Andrei Racu was among the perpetrators, and he knew Racu primarily by his nickname—Andrei the Gypsy.34 The last piece of information I managed to corroborate refers to a massacre committed in the village of Pepeni in 1941. The oral histories recorded in Pepeni neither confirm nor deny the guilt of particular defendants put on trial after World War II, but they nevertheless confirm the accuracy of the overall account, as depicted by the NKVD investigation documents. These documents depict the killing of over 200 Jews—including men, women, and children—who were locked in Pepeni’s town hall after the arrival of the Romanian gendarmes. Scared by rumors about the Soviet army’s return and the potential liberation of the Jews, the chief of the gendarmes, together with two gendarmes and two dozen villagers, slaughtered all the Jews in the course

soviet postwar investigation and trial documents 149

of one night. First the Romanians threw a grenade into the town hall; then they shot through the windows. Meanwhile the locals used bats, shovels, and other tools to kill any who tried to escape. The NKVD depositions of the defendant Ivan Sadovei present a stark personal admission of guilt in the Pepeni affair: “After the shooting stopped outside and while the moans of people who were not dead yet could be heard, I entered the building with a bat in my hands and saw a nasty image. The living were hiding behind the dead, hoping to save their lives. But they did not succeed. I personally killed 15 people inside the house with my bat. I beat them so much that the bat was dripping with blood [Bil tak chto dubinka vsia byla zalita kroviu]. Afterward I turned over the dead, searching for the living among them.”35 Moreover, Sadovei named numerous Moldovans from Pepeni, describing their participation in the massacre: “We were all armed with strong bats with which you could easily kill a person. Equally, each of us took part in trying to make it impossible for the Jews to escape the building. While the shooting was going on, we used bats to kill anyone who was trying to avoid death [by escaping] through the window. . . . There were times when the defenseless victims, rushing from one side to the other, headed toward the window hoping to be saved, but after seeing us they jumped back. If they succeeded, however, our blows simply crushed them back into the room, where they were finished off. I personally hit a Jew in the head when he stuck it out the window and tried to run and killed him in one stroke.”36 A 2008 USHMM interview with a Pepeni villager, Andrei Vulpe, echoed Sadovei’s gripping account from the perspective of an onlooker. Vulpe had been a teenager in 1941 and was not present during the massacre. But since his house was very close to the town hall, he heard the shootings and the screaming during the night and out of curiosity went to the killing ground the next morning. His description of the murder site matches that given by the defendants in the NKVD files: blood on the doorsteps, pieces of human flesh on the walls, bodies being dragged away.37 Although these oral histories testify to the credibility of information provided by the NKVD files, we nevertheless need to avoid stretching this conclusion to include the entire collection of Soviet postwar trial materials. We should still approach the dossiers with care and keep in mind that some of the depositions may have been produced through coercive means.

The Issue of Professionalism Another indication that NKVD material can be considered a legitimate source comes from the professionalism with which the investigations and trials were conducted. There are reasons to believe that the investigation of mass

150  diana dumitru

murders of Jewish civilians was approached in a serious and professional manner in the Soviet Union after World War II. Tanja Penter was the first Western scholar to emphasize the professionalization of the justice departments during the postwar period, based on Ukrainian collections of postwar trial records.38 The Moldovan collections confirm that relatively careful investigations were conducted and professional methods were applied to the hearing of mass murders of Moldova’s Jewish population, in contrast to other infamously conducted trials of the Stalinist era.39 For example, in the case of Alexandru Sârbu-Ene, a Moldovan accused of participation in the massacre at Cepeleuți, the court observed that several details offered by witnesses in the trial were contradictory and, therefore, decided to hold an inquiry experiment in the field. The entire court—including the judges, the defendant with his lawyer, and the witnesses—traveled from the district center to the village of Cepeleuți to verify whether witnesses to the crime could indeed see and hear things they alleged to have witnessed in certain spots. Once they reached the site, the group became convinced that the received testimonies were truthful and that the places matched the witnesses’ initial statements.40 When an investigator considered it necessary to repudiate a fierce denial of participation in murder, he could call an astonishing number of witnesses. In the case of Timofei Gheorghilaș, accused of killing and robbing Jews in Dumbrăveni during a pogrom organized by gentiles from neighboring villages, 27 witnesses were called. The defendant continued to insist that somebody had set him up and persuaded the witnesses to denounce him. He said that he did not get along with 9 of the 27 witnesses, so their depositions should not be accepted as objective. Gheorghilaș failed to convince the court that all the witnesses, including several Jews who had survived the massacre, were giving false testimony. The court sentenced him to 25 years in prison. One oral history interview confirms the proficiency of NKVD personnel. As remembered by Fiodor Şchiopu, a Moldovan who had just returned from the Soviet army in May 1944, he was summoned several times to the NKVD district office but never complied.41 The police wanted to speak to him about his participation in the burial of Jewish victims killed by Romanians in his native village. In 1941, Romanian authorities summoned Şchiopu, together with two other villagers, to a grazing field to bury the dead. Şchiopu was present when the Romanian gendarmes killed the Jews, mostly women and children. He clearly remembered how a baby was thrown in the ditch alive, but men covered him with earth anyway.42 One day a Soviet police officer came to the local town hall and demanded Şchiopu be brought in for interrogation. The officer questioned him about his participation in the killing of the Jews and particularly wanted to know who threw the baby in the ditch. Irri-

soviet postwar investigation and trial documents 151

tated by what he interpreted as a personal accusation, Şchiopu explosively declared himself guilty, admitting to all accusations. But the officer, according to Şchiopu, told him they knew someone else was to blame. Soon afterward, Şchiopu provided details about the episode, including the names of other villagers who took part in burying the dead, and singled out a villager named Buzovschi as the one who threw the baby into the ditch.43 As Şchiopu’s case demonstrates, the NKVD was screening local residents to find those involved in criminal activity during the Romanian presence in Bessarabia during World War II, but it did not terrorize every member of the population or lock up every suspect. The trial documents also reveal an attempt to discern between crimes that could be considered fully demonstrated and those that remained questionable. The final accusations did not include questionable cases like that of Semen Povaliuk, charged with several criminal offenses, including the murder of Jews from Liublin village. The court admitted that, in regards to Povaliuk’s direct participation in the mass shooting of 19 Jews from Liublin village, “the court session did not find enough evidence. . . . Povaliuk did not admit taking part in this murder, while the testimonies of four witnesses who were just 15–16 years old in 1941 were perceived as controversial.” As a result, the court excluded this specific episode from the indictments. Nevertheless, Povaliuk received a 25-year sentence for other crimes, including the torture and murder of an old Jewish couple from Grușca village.44 In a similar manner, the accusation that two brothers participated in the murder of 27 Jews from the village of Petrești was dropped from the formal charges against them because the eyewitness to the execution did not confirm that the defendants were at the site of the killing.45 Despite some partial acquittals, the conviction rate in postwar trials was exceptionally high. In only one case of more than a hundred did the court fail to convict a defendant and release him due to insufficient proof. This happened to Casian Frumos, one of the suspects in the Pepeni massacre.46 Despite some indicators of professionalism present in the investigations, the high conviction rate might arouse suspicion regarding the Soviet judiciary, but this is probably a misreading of events. In fact, information from the oral history sources suggests that the conviction rate was so high because these cases had an abundance of evidence, with victims and perpetrators easily identified. The oral accounts on the Holocaust in Moldova make it clear that local perpetrators expected to commit murder with impunity. Because they did not expect to be punished, these perpetrators took no steps to conceal their participation in these crimes during the summer of 1941. They murdered Jews in full sight of others, both in the villages and in the surrounding

152  diana dumitru

fields. Because it was summertime, most villagers were outdoors working in the fields, while their children tended cows and sheep. Many gentiles saw perpetrators forcing Jews toward the murder sites and easily recognized the victims and their would-be murderers. Some peasants were there by accident, whereas curiosity propelled others after they heard shots. Clearly, the names and deeds of residents who took part in the violence against Jews in 1941 have been an open secret in every Moldovan village where such killings occurred. When the NKVD officers arrived three years after the murders, they did not need to undertake convoluted and time-consuming investigations, since crucial information was available on the surface, and eyewitnesses to crimes abounded. Most probably, they needed only to interrogate a few villagers in a given location to discover whether Jews had been murdered there and to put together a list of names of locals involved in these crimes.

Thinking in a Larger (Political) Context and Paying Attention to Details It is important to emphasize that the postwar trials of collaborators were different in their aim and political rationale from the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s and the late Stalinist purges. The 1930s trials took place largely for political reasons and were designed to annihilate party leaders.47 With the onset of the Cold War and Israel’s alliance with the West, Stalin perceived with deep aversion and suspicion any manifestation of Jewish activism. As a result, he oversaw an official persecution of prominent Jews in 1948. This purge led to the disbanding of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, the anti-Zionist campaign, and the Doctors’ Plot, where numerous people were forced into confessing to nonexistent counterrevolutionary crimes. But despite these high-level political cases featuring Jews, most Soviet postwar trials were intended to punish those regarded as having collaborated with Romanian and Nazi forces and to reestablish Soviet order in these territories. An important element in the trials is that none of the postwar convictions were based solely on the defendant’s confession. Instead, they depended on eyewitness testimony. Of course, there were gray areas and specific political agendas when the Soviet judiciary dealt with various accusations of treason committed in the occupied territories, as other scholars have noted.48 There is little reason, however, to suspect that Soviet courts fabricated criminal cases and set up innocent people for the charge of killing Jews. It is ridiculous to suggest that Soviet repressive organs, at the very height of their state’s anti-Jewish campaign (even masked under the euphemism “rootless cosmopolitans”),

soviet postwar investigation and trial documents 153

arrested and condemned innocent Bessarabian peasants on charges of murdering Jews during World War II.49 Minor tangential details also at times increase confidence in the validity of these trials, especially when NKVD officers include depositions that shed a bad light on the representatives of the soviet. For instance, one woman accused of robbing Jews in the town of Rezina was caught hiding numerous objects—samovars, carpets, cloths, linens—with relatives and acquaintances. In her defense, she insisted she hid these items out of fear of Russian soldiers, who in April 1944 had taken two sheep and a pig from her. The officer neither challenged her point nor censored her statement from the records. Instead, he questioned her line of argument: if this had happened in April, why was she still hiding things in August? Ultimately, the woman confessed to the offense and was sentenced to ten years in jail.50 The numerous linguistic mistakes in the statements also raise questions.51 Sometimes, they support the idea of authenticity. All the documentation was produced in Russian, and translators participated in many of the interrogations. Soviet officers with Russian-sounding names—Chernov, Petenkov, and so on—had accompanied their NKVD and SMERSH units in 1944 and 1945. They spoke no Romanian and lacked a proper understanding of local politics. These functional constraints limited investigators’ personal intervention in the affidavits. Records of witness interrogations often included verbatim, distorted phonetic forms of various Romanian words. These errors attest that Romanian-speaking Bessarabian residents did provide factual information, rather than assenting to a preplanned, predetermined script.52 At other times, the particular details—familiar only to a resident of interwar Bessarabia—prove equally revealing. The investigation of Vasilii Mateesco, accused of participating in a pogrom in the village of Ghirovo, identified him as a former member of the National Christian Party. This party, familiarly known as the Cuzists, subscribed to radical right-wing nationalist views—including ferocious antisemitism. Mateesco initially denied belonging to the cuzist party but then changed his story. The interrogator asked detailed questions about the party’s platform to which the defendant gave precise and comprehensive responses. His answers merely attest to the accuracy of the recorded dialogue, however, not to the circumstances that led to Mateesco’s confession. Apparently, Mateesco admitted to entering the cuzist party in Ghirovo in 1930 and said that he actively participated in its meetings and demonstrations. He also explained that the party’s nickname derived from the name of its leader—A. C. Cuza—and that it endorsed the idea of “Romania for Romanians.” Mateesco summarized the cuzists’ na-

154  diana dumitru

tional policy: “The Romanian state belongs only to the Romanian ethnic group. Other nationalities living in Romania are unreliable, and we must fight against the Jewish nationality. . . . Cuza himself promised that after taking supreme power, the cuzist party will confiscate all the Jews’ property and hand it over to Cuzists.”53 One detail—Cuza’s name—was mistakenly written several times as Cuzo, the form that Russian speakers regarded as typical. The person who wrote down the interrogation records appears not to have known much about the cuzist party and its leader. One witness in this case mentioned that in 1930 he saw Mateesco and three other villagers participating in a demonstration in support of the cuzist party. The witness vividly described a cuzist procession, including a flag and participants carrying big clubs (mochugu, the flawed Russian transliteration of maciucă), the party symbol. The witness also mentioned that the demonstrators walked through villages, where they appealed to peasants to join the Cuzists and to beat and rob Jews.54 All these details sound extremely familiar to any scholar of right-wing movements in interwar Romania. Processions in support of the Cuzists were frequent in interwar Bessarabia and usually included flags and other paraphernalia. Lieutenant Petenkov, who took down this testimony in May 1944, probably lacked intimate knowledge of interwar Bessarabia, so it is unlikely he could have used such information to falsely accuse Mateesco. Nevertheless, other local residents could have initiated the slander. A Bessarabian who accused a neighbor could count on a sensitive repressive organ paying close attention to the residents’ previous political affiliations. Thus it was quite easy to provide a credible account, especially given the Soviet officers’ ignorance of interwar Bessarabian politics. Unfortunately, neither the NKVD documents nor the oral histories can elucidate these questions.55

What We Can Learn from Moldovan Postwar Trial Files about the Holocaust Above all, the Soviet postwar trial materials provide illuminating details about occupier and civilian violence toward Jews after the Soviet authorities withdrew in 1941. When combined with other historical sources, they help us specify when, were, and how numerous victims died. Moreover, historians can uncover certain information previously obfuscated by the historical literature on the Holocaust, the memories of survivors, or the witnesses to atrocities.56 Scholars looking for the causes of civilian violence toward Jews will find in these documents a wide sample of explanations. As Vladimir Solonari discusses in his chapter, these include many already present in literature on the

soviet postwar investigation and trial documents 155

Holocaust: opportunism, resentment, the prospect of rapid self-enrichment, instigation by authorities, a desire to gain influence in the new regime, and sadism. Some prominent explanations, however, do not find support in these NKVD files for Moldova. For example, Roger Petersen’s argument—that a significant portion of the violence against Jews committed by civilians in 1941 in Eastern Europe was due to resentment at Jews’ perceived participation in government during the brief Soviet takeover after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (from the fall of 1940 to the spring of 1941)—does not hold water.57 The Moldovan postwar files indicate that such violent and vindictive acts primarily targeted Christians rather than Jews.58 The oral histories also indicate that Bessarabian villagers did not necessarily perceive Jews as supporters of communism.59 Moreover, the respondents clearly associate the implementation of communism in Bessarabia with the postwar years, but not with 1940. Bessarabian interviewees proved quick to identify the brutality of the Soviet system, especially deportations to Siberia. But none of them pointed to Jews as persecutors or spoke of them as the main beneficiaries of the regime change in 1940. This situation is rather puzzling and stands out in comparison to similar interviews conducted in western Ukraine. As opposed to Ukrainian postwar trial files, the Moldovan dossiers do not avoid the issue of antisemitism. The records of the Pepeni case ascribe the defendant’s murderous actions to his “resentment and hatred toward the Jewish nationality.”60 In another case, the perpetrator justified his participation in a massacre of the local Jewish population by saying that “during the whole time [between the wars,] the Romanian government educated the population, including [himself] in the spirit of national hostility and hatred toward the Jewish population.”61 Certain pieces of factual or explanatory information found in the NKVD files acquires additional nuances when compared with oral history sources. For example, Vladimir Solonari notes that the Romanian military, gendarmerie, police, and various civil servants employed bribes to encourage locals to round up and kill as many Jews as quickly as possible. According to Solonari, offers of victims’ clothing bribed a part of the gentile population into murder.62 Indeed, plenty of NKVD evidence confirms that many of those who participated in massacres took clothing from murdered Jews. When oral history is linked to the NKVD materials, however, it complicates the story of murderous corruption in Bessarabia in 1941 and in some cases turns Solonari’s conclusion on its head. Much evidence indicates that local peasants actively corrupted Romanian soldiers and gendarmes in order to rob and kill Jews. USHMM oral history accounts inform us that Bessarabian peasants

156  diana dumitru

waited along the deportees’ route, seeking to “buy up” well-dressed Jews from the Romanian gendarmes. These peasants then killed the prisoners and took their clothes and other belongings.63 In the villages of Gârbova, Verejeni, Ochiul Alb, Lencăuţi, and Hlinaia, local gentiles purchased Jews from deportee columns, then robbed and murdered them. Some perpetrators later told their fellow villagers (who were interviewed by the USHMM) how much they paid and what they did to the Jews, who were killed in forests or drowned. One issue that demands further research and clarification is the effect of social conformity on villagers’ involvement in the persecution of Jews. Some of the Moldovan postwar documents do point in this direction. For example, defendants explained that they were “led by the example” of other peasants in committing their crimes.64 Postwar trial materials demonstrate that most civilian violence against Jews was committed not by solitary individuals but by groups of villagers. According to the documents, 20 perpetrators were tried in Pepeni, 16 in Marianovca de Sus, 14 in Cepeleuţi, and more than 10 in Ghirovo. In several cases, two or more relatives attacked local Jews in concert. These data suggest that the community did not perceive attacks on Jews as despicable. Instead of condemning such behavior, a family might share antisemitic sentiments and encourage violence against the Jewish community. For example, one trial of perpetrators from Ghirişeni village included five defendants with the same last name (Moghilda). At least two of these individuals, Gheorghii Konstantinovici Moghilda and Vladimir Konstantinovici Moghilda, appear to be closely related. Probably they were brothers, although the trial documents do not say so directly. In another case, a father and son took part in a massacre in the village of Cepeleuţi.65 Given the repulsiveness of the crimes, it is tempting to conclude that the perpetrators came from the margins of society.66 A careful study of the personal files from the postwar trial materials, however, reveals the Bessarabian perpetrators to have been quite “ordinary” relative to other members of their communities.67 Most were males in their late twenties and thirties and married with children. Ethnic Moldovans made up the majority, while a minority comprised Ukrainians, Russians, and other groups. The records list 54 percent of the defendants as “average” peasants (seredniaki), 17 percent as poor peasants (bedniaki), 16 percent as rich peasants (kulaki), and 11 percent as “other.”68 In terms of literacy, 41 percent of the defendants were literate, 35 percent minimally literate (malogramotnyi), and 18 percent illiterate (negramotnyi). Five percent of the case files do not record this information. As we can see, 70 percent of Bessarabian perpetrators were average or rich peasants, and 41 percent were literate. Given that interwar Bessarabia

soviet postwar investigation and trial documents 157

was known for its deplorable economic situation and agrarian overpopulation, while only 38.1 percent of Bessarabians were literate in 1930, the individuals who persecuted Jews appear no less poor and no less “cultured” than the rest of the population.69 In fact, the NKVD documents suggest that a typical Holocaust perpetrator in Bessarabia in 1941 did not stand out much at all from his peers, except in terms of the horrific atrocities they committed.

8

A Disturbed Silence Discourse on the Holocaust in the Soviet West as an Anti-Site of Memory Tarik Cyril Amar

C

ompared with the Soviet period, public memory of the Holocaust has been growing in importance in Eastern Europe since 1991.1 The implosion of Soviet hegemony has opened new spaces for research and debate.2 At the same time, new pressures have emerged to subordinate the Holocaust to nationalist narratives in, for instance, Ukraine.3 The post-Soviet present, however, cannot be understood without a fresh exploration of the Soviet legacy. The Soviet period did not simply impose a freeze, communicative silence, organized forgetfulness, or “mnemonical stasis.”4 Although terms like these describe one important aspect of what happened, they also obscure an equally important question. Factoring in what the Soviet period added or fostered, in addition to what it suppressed or took away, we are led to a substantial change in our view of the Soviet legacy and its persistent effects. By erasing the Soviet period, that view becomes simplified and dehistoricized. Fully restoring its history through a closer reading of its official discourse does not make the Soviet system appear more moral. As this chapter shows, Soviet contributions to memory could do at least as much damage as Soviet suppression. To advance the need for a more complex and fuller understanding of the postwar history of the memory of the Holocaust under direct Soviet rule—one that extends beyond overburdened metaphors of “freezing” and “thawing”—I employ a microscopic lens. I focus on official—that is, permitted—Soviet discourse in and about the city of Lviv in western Ukraine. At 158

a disturbed silence 159

this stage, we need a closer reading and fuller conceptualization of Soviet discourse. To limit its scope, this chapter does not systematically compare the Lviv case with other places that have similar twentieth-century histories shaped by multiethnic populations, a location between Germany and Russia, competing nationalisms, empires, totalitarianisms, and mass state violence—including repeated changes of regime and occupation, expulsions, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and, in particular, the Holocaust.5 At the same time, there are points of comparison, in particular with reference to the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.6 Although the chapter restricts its comprehensive survey, integrated discussion, and taxonomy of Soviet Holocaust discourse to Lviv and western Ukraine, its findings may also shed new if indirect light on other regions of the Soviet west. Work on the memory of the Holocaust in countries that came under Soviet hegemony but were not annexed to the Soviet Union provides an important context. The most effective contribution to this growing literature is Jan Gross’s Neighbors and the debate and research in and beyond Poland that it sparked.7 Exactly how the cases of Soviet satellites compare with the Soviet west and how they interacted during and after the Soviet period is a topic for future research.8 Such a study must take into account the expansion of the European Union as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union. As several authors have pointed out, some form of official recognition and commemoration of the Holocaust has become, in Omer Bartov’s words, “a precondition for entry into the European Union” (EU).9 This reality complicates the perception of patterns. Both the Baltic states and western Ukraine were part of the Soviet west (if in institutionally different ways—another important aspect), but the Baltic states now belong to the EU, whereas western Ukraine does not. Poland was a satellite; western Ukraine was not. During World War II, however, the territory that is now Poland experienced pogroms similar to those in what is now western Ukraine. In fact, western Ukraine was then part of Poland. But these days, an investigation into similarities and differences must consider not only the distinction between postwar satellite status and full Soviet annexation but also Poland’s EU membership. Moreover, as Timothy Snyder has pointed out, European memory challenges are mutual, with Western Europe’s historical narratives and imaginative and identity gaps counterposed to Eastern Europe’s different memories as an irritant rather than an opportunity.10 I could go on, but the main point is that the influence of different regimes since 1939, if not before, is another topic for future research.

160  tarik cyril amar

In addition to Soviet discourse, I discuss two other official or quasiofficial discourses available in Lviv and western Ukraine during and after the war: German and Ukrainian nationalist propaganda. This does not deny the importance of other sources, such as family memory and local traditions, which also transmitted information and shaped or reshaped interpretations. For example, Yaroslav Hrytsak has mixed his personal and family memories (and his explanations of family silence) with his interpretation of interviews. He stresses the lack of communication and knowledge about the Holocaust and argues that these factors combine with the general fragility and defensiveness of modern Ukrainian national identity to explain the current state of memory and oblivion. He identifies the Soviet legacy as one of the main reasons for historical amnesia among Ukrainians.11 There was no full amnesia, however, and the Soviet legacy had more complex effects than Hrytsak recognizes. The effects of official discourse cannot be reduced to a literal transmission of fully articulated messages to captive audiences. Official discourse was both crucial and ubiquitous. For most of the period under discussion, it enjoyed a monopoly on certification and support by an authoritarian, invasive, and, at times, very violent and usually terrifying regime. Although ignorance and lack of information existed, we should not overstate their impact. As John-Paul Himka and Wendy Lower have shown, the Holocaust in Lviv and western Ukraine featured public events that included substantial local participation across class, gender, and urban-rural divides. It was not isolated or secret. Despite the many disruptions and displacements of the war, it makes little sense to assume that all information—publicly visible, personally experienced, and widespread to begin with—suddenly vanished after 1945.12 Terms like “amnesia” misleadingly imply slates left and made blank, where we need instead to investigate the rewriting on them, even if that rewriting appears faint and unusual in retrospect and the messages follow rules of their own. It underestimates the Soviet system to assume that the stories it told or supported did not matter. It credits that system with an efficiency it never possessed if we believe that it could create or maintain an information space isolated enough to prevent alternative stories from leaving, entering, or being created inside it. Excising the Jews from the Holocaust was a major Soviet story but not the only one. Nor did the system seek to establish a vacuum. The scarcity it created magnified the impact of other stories, even inchoate ones expressed in hints. Stalin’s subjects could produce and articulate heterodox thought by drawing on official discourse.13 The question is not whether the resulting productions were true or false but that we have tended to ignore the complexity

a disturbed silence 161

that arose from the meeting between Soviet subjects and official discourse, including silence, about the Holocaust. Soviet discourse also told its own stories, which interacted with local traditions and with other authoritarian narratives, including those of Ukrainian nationalists. Moreover, Soviet discourse made silence resonant. Even in a borderland such as Lviv, the effects of Soviet discourse were enhanced by the dearth of alternative information. Where the party-state restricted the flow of knowledge, its discourse and silence gained in strength but not to the point of omnipotence. Some Soviet discourse was rejected or refashioned— especially in a city like Lviv, Sovietized only in World War II and marked by Ukrainian nationalism. This tendency intensified in response to tensions between “locals” from Lviv or western Ukraine and “easterners”—those arriving after 1939 and again after 1944—and the vicinity of the “outer empire” of satellized states in Eastern and Central Europe, where ideological constraints tended to be weaker. In this chapter I focus on the construction of discourses, not their reception. Soviet discourse on the Holocaust—in all its frustratingly opaque, different, and mendacious ways—existed. Unless we take it seriously and analyze it carefully, we will not understand the lasting effects of the Soviet period. Although official discourse was not fully accepted, it had significant influence. Official and unofficial discourses interacted for decades. Let us not reduce this interaction to bipolar stories of imposition and resistance, failure and success. The ability of Soviet subjects to appropriate dominant discourse selectively and creatively both limited and strengthened that discourse. Do any weapons of the weak (or the strong) not sometimes backfire? In particular, as Jan Karski noted, antisemitism offered a site of mutual understanding even where rulers and ruled otherwise disagreed. Karski wrote about the special case of German-occupied Poland, and the forms and effects of antisemitism and authoritarian rule differed substantially across Central and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1991. Nevertheless, his insight has potential for qualified generalization, particularly in territories such as western Ukraine where several factors coincided. These factors included a long multiethnic history, pre-Soviet antisemitism, German occupation and the Holocaust, Soviet occupation and conquest, mass Soviet repression, and anti-Soviet nationalist resistance and its defeat, followed by two generations of Soviet postwar rule. Lviv and western Ukraine shared these features with much of the Soviet west—a broad strip of diverse territories that had in common their acquisition by the Soviet Union as a result of World War II and a geographical overlap with much of the main killing zone of the Holocaust. The Holocaust discourses produced in and about a key city of the Soviet

162  tarik cyril amar

west reveal a key element in the making of a specific “social imaginary”—one shaped by multiple incidences of “negative integration” that developed over decades, through war and peace, and across different regimes. These regimes included a German occupation that, although cruel and exploitative toward non-Jews, sought common ground with them in hostility toward Jews.14

Lviv: A Site of Violence, Sovietization, Ukrainianization—and Oblivion? Lviv is now the urban center of the unofficial but generally recognized region of western Ukraine. Until World War II, it was more often called Lwów (in Polish) or Lemberg (in German) and Lemberik (in Yiddish). From the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century, the city’s population was multiethnic, with its culture and cityscape shaped by several kinds of Christianity as well as Judaism. Historically, the three ethno-religious, later national, communities that most shaped the city were Roman Catholics/Poles, Jews, and Orthodox Christian (mostly Uniate) Ukrainians.15 After its founding in the thirteenth century, Lviv soon came under Polish rule. It passed into Habsburg hands in the long nineteenth century, then became part of interwar Poland after World War I. From the mid-nineteenth century on, Polish and Ukrainian nationalist projects intensified national competition and conflicting claims to the city. Yet not until 1939–46 was Lviv’s history of Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian multiethnicity brought to a violent end. In Lviv, the Holocaust meant the murder and plunder of the Jewish third of the city’s population. Then, between 1944 and 1946, the Soviet authorities de facto expelled most of the city’s Poles, who constituted slightly more than half of the city’s prewar inhabitants and more than two-thirds of its surviving residents in the summer of 1944. With the two largest politically and culturally formative prewar groups gone, Lviv was Sovietized and Ukrainianized. In the postwar decades, the share of ethnic Russians as well as a much smaller group of new Jewish inhabitants from the eastern regions of the Soviet Union declined steadily. According to the extrapolated census data of 2001, Ukrainians made up almost 90 percent of Lviv’s population, Russians 9 percent, and Poles and Jews 1–2 percent.16 In post-Soviet, independent Ukraine—marked by regional diversity in its cultures of memory—Lviv represents a specifically Ukrainian identity, in counterdistinction to Russian and Russian-influenced Ukrainian identities.17 In contemporary Lviv two historic legacies meet: a Jewish past of several centuries, which significantly shaped the city until it ended with the Holocaust, and a pronounced, ethnically national Ukrainian present and symbolism.

a disturbed silence 163

Imperfect Omission, Implicit Messages The consensus in Western scholarship on Soviet attitudes toward the Holocaust stresses the omission or deemphasis of the Germans’ drive to kill Jews in particular. Although Soviet studies of World War II generally did not deny the fact that millions of Jews had been murdered, they marginalized the suffering and killing of Jews. With some exceptions, “Soviet audiences,” as Zvi Gitelman has found, were “generally not exposed to even the most elementary details of the Holocaust.”18 Soviet discourse suppressed the Nazi regime’s targeting of Jews with extraordinary comprehensiveness. It submerged Jewish suffering in a narrative of general Nazi racism, regarded as an aspect of fascism—in its Marxist interpretation, an extreme form of crisis-ridden capitalism/imperialism.19 As Amir Weiner has shown, this suppression was linked to the denial of any specifically Jewish contribution to the victory over Germany, then becoming the main legitimacy myth of the postwar Soviet Union.20 Studies of postSoviet Holocaust memory in specific parts of the Soviet west have also stressed the view that the Soviets influenced this memory mostly or even exclusively through public silencing and omission.21 While Jews were not permitted to be visible in the same way as others in the fight against the Germans, the punishments imposed on Soviet citizens who had worked for the Germans, as Tanja Penter has shown, effectively trivialized the harming and killing of Jews. By focusing on treason rather than participation in the Holocaust, Soviet war crimes trials largely ignored antisemitic motives, and their charges implied that it was “worse to be a Ukrainian nationalist than to participate in the murder of hundreds of Jews.” Cases of Jewish survivors punished for collaboration with the Germans underlined that alleged disloyalty to Soviet rule overrode even being a victim of the Holocaust.22 Moreover, judicial documents and sentences indicated a hierarchy of victims in which Soviet, party, and underground activists took priority over ordinary civilians, a group that implicitly included most Jews. But even though most trials were not public, knowledge about them did spread, providing a limited arena for alternative memory discourses that could include the mass murder of Jews. These alternative discourses may have had a special importance in western Ukraine. Although only a quarter of the population of postwar Soviet Ukraine lived in the west, the region provided more than half of those arrested in early war crimes trials.23 In effect, intended and unintended messages did not contradict but reinforced each other. By inadvertently spreading some information about the murder

164  tarik cyril amar

of Jews while signaling that this was not an important issue, the trials confirmed the inferior place accorded to the Holocaust. In his chapter, Karel Berkhoff shows that, during the war, “explicit reports” on the German assault on the Jews “did exist and were more numerous than has been assumed,” even though Soviet attempts to “conceal that the Nazis were deliberately killing all the Jews” were frequent. A closer look at Lviv also leads me to qualify the dichotomy of suppression and recognition. Major Soviet publications on World War II in Lviv show that Soviet discourse was consistently distorted but not static. Its depiction of Lviv’s Yanivska (Janowska) camp illustrates such variations.24 The Yanivska camp—consisting of two formally separate but integrated and adjacent complexes—was a locally well-known key site of the Holocaust. As the contemporary witness Yevhen Nakonechyi recalled, the camp’s purpose—mass murder—was generally known “to the whole city.” By the fall of 1942 at the latest, the “majority of Lvivians . . . had no doubts” that the Germans sought the complete annihilation of all Jews, with frequent talk about it among the city’s non-Jews, “at home and outside.”25 Only a small share of those incarcerated at Yanivska were not Jewish, such as peasants punished for not meeting delivery quotas. In July 1943, shortly after the destruction of Lviv’s ghetto, Yanivska held more than 7,100 Jewish and 225 non-Jewish victims.26 Less than a month after the Soviet reconquest of the city in July 1944, the Polish publicist Bohdan Skaradziński, under his pen name Jan Brzoza, wrote one of the first major local articles on Lviv under German occupation. Published in the city’s Ukrainian-language newspaper Vil´na Ukraina on 19 August 1944, Brzoza’s article “Barbarians” located the Yanivska camp exactly, clearly identified it as a site of the mass murder of Jews, and described how they had been driven to its Piaski killing grounds. Brzoza explained that Yanivska had also served as a collection point for manhunts targeting Ukrainians and Poles, generally destined for forced labor deportation. In his text, the difference between these manhunts and mass murder was clear.27 Barely a week later, however, Vil´na Ukraina published a long article by Z. Vyner, which also mentioned Yanivska and its Piaski. Vyner’s “The Tragedy of the Lysynychi Forest” added a detailed eyewitness account of the death brigade of camp inmates, forced to destroy the remains of victims. Vyner’s article added another killing site as well as detail to the emerging Soviet picture of the Holocaust in Lviv but, unlike Brzoza’s piece, did not mention that most of the victims were Jewish. Instead, Vyner described them as “Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and Jews.”28 Two months later, Volodymyr (also known as Vladimir) Beliaev—a propagandist, novelist, and war correspondent who ar-

a disturbed silence 165

rived in Lviv in August 1944—made Yanivska the topic of another long Vil´na Ukraina article. He packed “We Will Not Forgive the German Murderers for the Crimes on Our Soil!” with detail about some German perpetrators but failed to mention their antisemitism or that their victims were Jewish. The only reference to Jews was the remark that the Germans had plundered the Jewish cemetery for tombstones to pave a road in Yanivska.29 By the end of 1944, a long Pravda article on “The Crimes of the Germans in Lviv Oblast,” republished in Ukrainian in Vil´na Ukraina, reproduced a statement from the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR (hereafter the Extraordinary State Commission). This article constituted an especially authoritarian and authoritative, though not the last, word on the issue.30 It described Yanivska and gave details about some perpetrators, their sadism and killings, and the death brigade. It did not mention that the victims were Jews. The article did, however, explain that Lviv’s Jews had been forced into a ghetto and subjected to murderous conditions. With the number of Jewish victims in the ghetto set above 130,000, the article stated that they had been killed either there or in Yanivska or in the Belzec death camp. Because it also provided an estimate of more than 200,000 victims killed at Yanivska and quoted a witness stating that in Yanivska he had met “Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews,” a reader could guess that Yanivska had been particularly important in murdering Jews.31 This ambiguity, eclipsing the identity of Jewish victims in the description of the camp while offering hints, did not last. Vil´na Ukraina’s version of the Pravda article already carried a one-page introduction that left out the details that enhanced the Extraordinary State Commission statement. When Vil´na Ukraina published a set of readers’ letters in response, these letters contained much detail on personal experiences but no mention of Yanivska or Jews.32 Both the first Soviet history of Lviv, published in 1956, and the 1969 Outlines of the History of the Lviv Oblast Party Organization—in effect, also a general postwar history of Lviv—described Yanivska without reference to Jews.33 The Outlines explained that Yanivska, although called a “forced labor camp” by the Germans, had in reality been a “death camp.” Yet the Outlines did not only de-ethnicize its victims into “Soviet citizens.” Instead, it assigned ethnic identity to everyone except Jews: “men and women, the elderly and children—Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, [and] citizens of French, Czech, Yugoslav, Italian, American, and English allegiance.”34

166  tarik cyril amar

The next edition of the Outlines, published in 1980, was the first to add Jews.35 Five years later, a major document collection on Soviet Ukraine during the Great Patriotic War identified the Lviv ghetto as targeting Jews and Yanivska as a place where “all Jews caught” had been taken. Yet the same applied to people of other nationalities, and the 1980 edition still presented the camp as abusing and killing an undifferentiated Soviet population.36 The postwar history of Yanivska in Soviet discourse illustrates both the prevailing Soviet tendency to marginalize the Holocaust as a crime particularly targeting Jews and the imperfect silence that resulted.

Early Soviet Discourse Soviet knowledge of the German assault on the Jews inside Soviet borders dated back to the beginning of the German-Soviet war in the summer of 1941. The Soviet leaders, including Stalin, soon received information on the mass murder of Jews and Roma (Gypsies) by the Germans.37 At this early stage of the war, statements on Nazi plans for the “total destruction of the Jewish people” at a Jewish Antifascist Committee meeting in August 1941 were broadcast live and reported in major Soviet newspapers.38 As Amir Weiner has pointed out, a 1941 play on partisans by the Soviet Ukrainian author Oleksandr Korniichuk included references to German attacks on Jews.39 But this play referred to Jews being murdered in Rotterdam. Closer to home, Korniichuk did not mention the victims’ Jewish identity, as Myroslav Shkandrij has noted.40 The Lviv pogroms at the beginning and end of July were among the first major German atrocities reported by the Soviet media. On 8 August 1941, the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformbiuro) reported “numerous accounts and letters” from Lviv about German crimes that left thousands dead.41 The bureau, however, categorized the victims only by political affiliation or occupation, not by nationality or religion. One purpose of the report, apparently, was to refute the evidence of massacres committed by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in Lviv before the Germans arrived. It decried the “fascist propaganda [that] has droned on . . . about the [allegation] that . . . the Hitlerites purportedly found proof of ‘Bolshevik atrocities.’” The Sovinformbiuro asserted that these “fantastic” German “inventions” were only a “clumsy attempt” to conceal the Germans’ own crimes.42 What German (and Ukrainian nationalist) propaganda was “droning on” about, however, was not merely “Bolshevik crimes” but the specific stereotype of “Judeo-Bolshevik crimes.” Fuel for the pogroms that accompanied the German taking of Lviv came from accusations that Jews had helped the Soviets to oppress and kill local non-Jews and that Soviets and Jews were one

a disturbed silence 167

and the same. Meanwhile, this propaganda failed to mention that the NKVD massacres included Jews among the victims.43 The Sovinformbiuro, in turn, told a story of German mass murder, purged of Jewish victims and local perpetrators. At the same time, it excised the German and Ukrainian-nationalist Judeo-Bolshevik motif from its description of German propaganda while denying or omitting any hint of prior NKVD crimes, local participation in pogroms, and targeted victimization of Jews. As Timothy Snyder has noted, the Soviet leaders omitted Jews from accounts of German atrocities in part to foil this German propaganda effort to identify the Soviet system with Jewish rule.44 Both the Nazi and the Soviet narratives explicitly or implicitly included misinformation or noninformation about Jews. Whereas the German occupiers and Ukrainian nationalists reinvented Jews as Bolshevik slaughterers, the Soviet media omitted that categorization but also ignored the fate of Jews themselves. Obviously, these narrative tactics arose from different motives and had radically different consequences. Yet they also reveal how antagonistic German and Soviet narratives could converge, confining the fate of Jews to a special discursive regime.

Ukrainian Nationalist Discourse For Lviv, the German occupation meant three years of official and quasiofficial alternatives to Soviet discourse. German antisemitic propaganda was relentless and ongoing, and Ukrainian nationalists continued to spread antisemitic stereotypes even after the Germans left.45 Official Ukrainian publications under German control were not mere translations of German input. They also provided a meeting ground for German and Ukrainian nationalist stereotypes. As a result, at least two sources of statements in addition to the Soviet discourse laid claim to state or quasi-state authority. A full picture of these temporary alternatives to the Soviet discourse would have to include the productions of the Polish underground, especially in Lwów/Lviv, a topic that still awaits systematic analysis. Christoph Mick has shown that at least some Polish Home Army reporting from the city combined “stereotypes from the arsenal of Polish prewar antisemitic accusations . . . with Nazi antisemitic tropes,” identifying Jews as the “most important internal enemy, whose final plan it was to replace the Poles as the ruling class.” Deploring the “difficult chronic disease” of the “problem of the Jewish minority,” the Home Army also called the German killing of Jews “ultrabestial.” Even though the Home Army noted in 1942, at the peak of German deportations and killings, that the open brutality of German manhunts elicited some pity for their Jewish victims even from non-Jews who were hostile to

168  tarik cyril amar

Jews, it went on to report that “generally it is said that the Jews are getting the punishment of history,” and that there was a “subconscious satisfaction that there will be no more Jews in the Polish organism.”46 Despite certain important differences between the Germans and the Ukrainian nationalists, both groups stood for authoritarian, violent, and nationalist politics and for antisemitism. Lviv’s German propaganda office remained active until the German retreat. L´vivski visti, the city’s Germancontrolled Ukrainian-language daily, maintained high print runs throughout the occupation: 296,000 copies in 1942; 238,000 in 1943; and 93,000 in 1944, when the German occupation was nearing its end.47 L´vivski visti reacted to the pogroms of July 1941 with articles identifying Bolshevik crimes as Jewish and holding Jews collectively responsible as a “spoilt race.” The newspaper blamed Jews not only for their own victimization but also for economic exploitation and centuries of failed Ukrainian urbanization.48 There was no sharp dividing line between taking advantage of opportunities offered by the German occupation regime for limited Ukrainian cultural activities and participating in German hatred. Nashi dni, also published in Ukrainian in Lviv, largely avoided politics to focus on high culture. But it, too, carried some antisemitic and racist articles.49 This propaganda did not end with the murder of its victims. As late as March 1944, when the local German occupation regime showed clear signs of panic and dissolution, it organized a major exhibition in Lviv on the “Jewish World Pestilence” and a comprehensive advertising campaign through posters, leaflets, loudspeakers, and cinemas.50 Illustrating the fantastic nature of the Judeo-Bolshevism complex, the last propaganda campaign before the German retreat emphasized the plunder and abuse that accompanied the Soviet reconquest in western Ukraine and accused local Jews of helping to introduce a “Jewish rule of terror,” even though hardly any local Jews had survived. A circular on exploiting information from Soviet-occupied areas featured the Soviets’ “possible preference for Jews.”51 At the time of the German attack on the Soviet Union, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)—including its “revolutionary” wing under Stepan Bandera, the OUN-B—was rife with antisemitism. The OUN conducted propaganda campaigns against “Stalinist and Jewish commissars,” called on the populace to “kill the enemies among you—Jews and informers,” used its emerging militia to segregate or eliminate Jews, and generally welcomed the German assault on them.52 Ukrainian nationalists took part in the Lviv pogrom of 30 June 1941, and during the pogrom, OUN-B activists led by the antisemite Yaroslav Stetsko gathered in a building in the city center and proclaimed a Ukrainian state.53 Despite the OUN-B’s declared readiness to

a disturbed silence 169

accept German hegemony and fight the Soviet Union as well as Jews, the German authorities quickly suppressed this initiative and arrested several key leaders. The Germans forced the OUN-B to abandon its pro-German orientation, if at first reluctantly and never completely.54 The Ukrainian nationalists, however, remained hostile toward Jews.55 In 1942, on the occasion of the first anniversary of its Lviv state declaration—a time when the Holocaust reached its peak in Ukraine—the OUN-B rejected both German and Soviet imperialism while pinning the latter on the Jews. It explained that “there is no class war but a war of nations,” with Ukrainians exploited not by “the landowner [or] the bourgeois but by a national enemy— the German, the Muscovite [moskal], the Hungarian, the Romanian, the Jew, the Pole.”56 Jews featured as a part of so-called Moscow-Jewish Bolshevism as well as a national enemy. In an explicit reference to attacks on Soviet forces and authorities and on Jews, the OUN-B boasted: “We shattered the forces of the Moscow-Jewish occupier through uprisings [and] sabotage. When war finally broke up, we joined in [the occupier’s] physical annihilation by [engaging in] partisan operations and attacked under the direction of our leader Stepan Bandera.” Moreover, the OUN-B defined the Moscow-Jewish enemy as a greater threat than the Germans. As long as the struggle against the Soviets continued, the OUN-B argued, “our political reason tells us to bide our time,” meaning to avoid a confrontation with the Germans.57 Hence we need to take a realistic approach in assessing the OUN-B’s turn toward a more moderate political style in the late summer of 1943—when Nazi Germany was on the defensive and the Ukrainian nationalists had already found the time and the resources to conduct a massive and coordinated ethnic cleansing campaign against the Poles. The timing of the OUN-B’s shift was opportunistic, and it had little effect on the ground. Although Myroslav Shkandrij has argued that the two main propagandists of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—not identical with the OUN-B but under its control— made no antisemitic statements between 1946 and 1952, in October 1944 a “Response by the UPA Fighters” to a Soviet appeal to surrender reiterated that “Hitler’s Germany is as much an enemy of Ukraine as Russia” and that the Ukrainian people, “and all other peoples subjugated by the Judeo-Commune” knew what they had to do to resist.58 Alongside the Ukrainian nationalists’ continuing propagation of the stereotype of Judeo-Bolshevism, another approach explicitly cited the mass murder of the Jews to urge Ukrainians to avoid a similar fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Thus, in 1943, the OUN announced that the “Ukrainian people, which does not want to allow itself to be passively slaughtered like

170  tarik cyril amar

the Jews, must arm and organize itself to resist the Bolshevik imperialists.”59 A later text addressed to the members of pro-Soviet local militias employed against the nationalists—the so-called destroyer or extermination battalions—challenged them, asking if they had “already forgotten the fate that awaited the Jewish militia men, who like you hunted their [own] brothers, and when they were gone, themselves fell victim to German bullets?”60 Such propaganda affected locally available ways of thinking about the Jews’ fate and its implications for Ukrainians in important ways. Despite significant affinities in terms of authoritarianism, intolerance, and violence, the Ukrainian nationalists represented a radical alternative to Soviet rule and ideology. During the war, other than these two forces, no articulate or widely known political options existed that—unlike German discourse and practice—could claim to present some image of Ukraine.61 Those with Ukrainian identities could choose to think differently, but they had no other publicly available ideological options, backed up by organized violence. Where the Soviet and Ukrainian nationalist ideologies converged, they reinforced each other—even though, and perhaps because, they otherwise expressed mutually hostile projects. In warning Ukrainians not to be killed “like Jews” by Soviet forces, Ukrainian nationalists conveyed several significant points. First, they described Jews not simply as victims but as, to some extent, guilty for not having resisted. Second, they denied the exceptionality of what had happened to the Jews by arguing that the Bolsheviks would do the same to Ukrainians. Third, they deployed the image of the Jews, already made to serve as an antipathetic foil in traditional stereotypes and in accusations of pro-Soviet collaboration and denunciation, both to affirm Ukrainian identity and to distinguish Ukrainians from Jews. Ukrainians would neither live nor die like Jews. In both life and death, Ukrainians would be better than Jews. While living under totalitarian occupation, Ukrainians had allegedly not collaborated—since the nationalists projected that behavior onto Jews (and, in other contexts, Poles). If they died, they would do so without the Jewish disgrace of passively accepting their own murder. This discourse is cynical. Yet in terms of its effects and legacies, its pertinent characteristic is its aggressive if implied insistence that the mass murder of the Jews did not matter. The continued use of the Judeo-Bolshevism stereotype even after the killing of nearly all Jews, the pitiless depiction of their manner of death, and the fantasy that the Soviet authorities would subject Ukrainians to the same murderous treatment combine to underline one momentous point. Ukrainian nationalists knew that the Jews had become the victims of mass murder. Internal OUN instructions of 1944 depicted collec-

a disturbed silence 171

tive “actions against Jews” as unnecessary. With few survivors left, the “Jewish question” had “ceased to be a problem,” although even then, individuals could still be targeted.62 But Ukrainian nationalists also publicly recognized the mass murder of Jews while refusing to revise the earlier charges leveled against them or to reduce the counterdistinctive distance established by these charges. In fact, they continued to emphasize the distinction between Ukrainians and Jews. If anything, they interpreted the manner in which the Jews had died as widening the gap, making its maintenance even more necessary for non-Jews.

The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission in Lviv Ukrainian nationalists were not the only ones warning that genocide might strike others besides Jews. In the summer of 1942, several important Soviet officials made public statements that accused the Germans of intending to annihilate the Belorussian, Estonian, and Lithuanian people while leaving out the Jews.63 Half a year later, on the occasion of Soviet Ukraine’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Soviet publications “dramatically Ukrainianized,” in Berkhoff’s words, the suffering in occupied Ukraine, focusing on Ukrainian victimization to the exclusion even of Russians; major Soviet Ukrainian leaders, including Nikita Khrushchev, told the Ukrainian public that Hitler was attempting to “physically exterminate the Ukrainians and all the Slavs.” Blaming Jews for having been killed by Germans was also not beyond the Soviet imagination. Privately, a Soviet journalist noted in 1943 that for Jews to fall into German hands implied lack of national dignity and even treason. This was the context in which the Extraordinary State Commission operated. The commission was established and announced to the public in late 1942, but it did not become effective until the April 1943 Polish-Soviet conflict over the Nazi discovery and Soviet denial of Soviet atrocities against Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere. Thus the commission emerged well after what Karel Berkhoff has identified as Stalin’s initiative to “[strip] . . . Jewish victims of their Jewishness.” The commission had a comprehensive brief that included investigating the economic and cultural damage inflicted by the Germans, identifying perpetrators, and publishing official reports but excluded any reference to the particular violence unleashed by the Germans against Jews.64 Commission publications issued between 1943 and 1945 rarely mentioned Jewish victims.65 The commission’s reporting was aimed at international audiences but also reached the Soviet public. Yet it was restricted in its geographical scope— western Ukraine as a whole was one area on which no final report was published—and minimized Jewish victimization.66

172  tarik cyril amar

The regional commission for Lviv was set up in June 1944. It submitted a survey on the results of its investigations in September 1945, providing a detailed description of economic losses and a terse one-paragraph summary of human casualties: “634,647 persons exterminated.”67 The survey categorized these victims into 159,212 prisoners of war (POWs) and “about 500,000 persons” killed in “the so-called Yanov [sic] death camp.” In addition, 114,539 inhabitants of the oblast had been “driven away into German slavery.” Although the figures were inconsistent and the number of victims at Yanivska included those who had been taken to Belzec and murdered there, the general picture was clear enough, even though it obscured the victims’ Jewish identity. Even earlier, in November 1944, the Lviv city commission’s main report had signaled the intent to diminish Jewish victimization by describing the 1941 pogrom as a “bloody riot,” directed against the “inhabitants of Lviv,” defined as “Soviet citizens.” Having erased the ethnic differences among the victims, the 1944 report identified the perpetrators only as “drunken hordes of German-fascist cutthroats,” echoing the Sovinformbiuro’s neglect of local perpetrators in 1941.68 Soviet internal—and sometimes public—statements did not always cover up the Germans’ targeting of Jews. A January 1942 note by Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov, published in Pravda, mentioned a Nazi killing spree in Lviv that took place under the slogan “Kill Off the Jews and the Poles.” The note conflated attacks on Jews and Poles that had differed in motivation and scale, however, and made “no effort to stress that this was a major Nazi policy.”69 In another incident, the Lviv oblast branch of the Young Communist League (Komsomol) documented the case of Bertold Zarvanitser, who had survived the German occupation in Lviv and wanted his Komsomol membership renewed. Zarvanitser was identified as Jewish, and the report noted that he hid from being “persecuted by the Gestapo” during the “time of the terrorist onslaught on Jewish families.”70 In a key speech against Ukrainian nationalism before a large western Ukrainian teachers’ meeting in Lviv in 1945, Dmytro Manuilskyi, one of Ukraine’s most prominent communist leaders, referred directly to local nonGermans participating in assaults on Jews. He explained that the Germans had based their policy in Ukraine on “setting the Ukrainians against the Poles, the Poles against the Ukrainians, both against the Russians, and all against the Jews,” while using “Polish and Ukrainian traitors to set up pogroms.” These statements were reprinted when the speech was published and turned into a canonical reference for Soviet propaganda against Ukrainian nationalism.71

a disturbed silence 173

On the whole, however, given that the Extraordinary State Commission spoke with the additional authority of a thorough local examination after the Soviet reconquest, its omission of the Jewish identity of local victims was predictable but not trivial. It confirmed that neither the Soviet victory nor the commission’s local investigation and the perspective of hindsight made a difference. The Jewish identity of victims and the local identity of some perpetrators remained marginal. Moreover, other local producers of representations and narrative also disseminated these conventions. In 1945, the Lviv History Museum organized an excursion to Yanivska as a site of the murder of “prisoners” and “civilians.”72 The city commission report resembled an undated memorandum on German atrocities for the Lviv procuracy in its structure, length, and phrasing. Both texts contained detailed descriptions of German Aktionen: individual instances of atrocities and killings, the mass murder of Soviet POWs, Yanivska, the ghetto, and the death brigade. Both texts quoted many witnesses, mostly with names such as Mandel or Korn that could be recognized as Jewish, and both explained that some of the victims had been killed in or around Lviv and others at the Belzec death camp.73 Yet a strong reticence to recognize the victimization of Jews as Jews prevailed. Only the ghetto was recognized as aimed in particular at Jews and their “premeditated extermination.” Only the mention of the deportation from the Lviv ghetto to Belzec implied any special link between Belzec and the killing of Jews.74 The city commission report, unlike the procuracy memorandum, did explain that Yanivska had been the destination for all “Jews caught” and that Jewish POWs had been selected for immediate killing at Lviv’s main Citadel POW camp.75 The memorandum, meanwhile, described the abuse and murder of two rabbis at Yanivska in a section on atrocities committed against clergy. It mentioned the “mass extermination of children,” targeting “especially children of Jewish nationality.”76 This reference to the children’s Jewish identity did not make it into the city commission’s report.77 This change was especially significant, because the memorandum’s recognition that the murdered children had been Jewish was its only explicit acknowledgment of the targeted victimization of Jews.78 Local reports produced in Lviv oblast in the second half of 1944 sometimes showed a different pattern, employing the categories of “peaceful population” and Jewish victims in a specific manner. If later Soviet discourse was built on an implicit dichotomy between them, these early local texts sometimes came close to implying their identity. In June 1945, the commissions for Lviv as a whole and for its Shevchenko raion together submitted a special report on the “damage” inflicted on the quarter’s Jews. After setting a total of

174  tarik cyril amar

“40,000 Jewish families” before the German occupation, the report described their ghettoization, mass execution, and deportation to Belzec. Stating that all the Jews had been “exterminated,” the report emphasized the concomitant plunder and provided detailed estimates for the total value of the spoils as well as a 20-page list of individual victims.79 A six-page report for the raion that included the town of Sokal and its rural surroundings, submitted in October 1944, began with a summary statement that the occupiers had killed “12,408 . . . absolutely innocent peaceful inhabitants.” It described the invaders’ arrival in June 1941 as a brutal purge of local officials—such as the raion prosecutor and a newspaper editor—and a massacre that killed 160 representatives of the “intelligentsia,” including party and Komsomol members. The report concluded with a chronological list of killings, including mass shootings, deportations, and death from famine and epidemics, with the victims generally designated as “people.” The Sokal commission also reported “Banderites”—that is, Ukrainian nationalists—killing Jews.80 The middle section of the Sokal report consisted of three pages of details and witness testimonies structured around German assaults, the ghetto, and deportations, with virtually all victims identified explicitly as Jews.81 The reader could add up the numbers of Jewish victims and correlate them with the statistics of the subsequent chronology of killings, showing that at least 10,500 of the 12,408 victims were Jews.82 The report also included an eyewitness account of a deportation to Belzec and one about the killing of 32 Jews who had gathered for a secret prayer meeting with a local rabbi.83 The report juxtaposed the terminology of “peaceful population” with statements about the killings of Jews in such a way that the categories seemed interchangeable. One page was filled with witnesses describing the end of the Sokal ghetto during an assault in May 1943. After the victims had repeatedly been identified as Jews, the report concluded, “thus . . . 6,000 people from the peaceful population were bestially tormented and shot in one month.”84 Clearly, the effect here was not to conceal or deny these victims’ Jewish identity. Similarly, the result of the second assault of October 1942 received the comment: “The ‘ghetto’ continued to exist because the butchers were not able to exterminate all the Jews at once. They set themselves the task of exterminating the peaceful population in a planned manner.”85 The witness who reported the murder of the 32 Jews meeting at the rabbi’s place also described the slaying of his son, who had told the killers: “You torture us like beasts, you kill innocent people. . . . The time will come when the Red Army will return and you will answer for all your misdeeds and shedding of innocent blood . . . with your blood.”86

a disturbed silence 175

The report on Sokal opened with a description of the murder of intellectuals and Soviet party and state representatives. Yet a ringing statement on the Soviet return (victory) and retribution was quoted only once—as coming from the rabbi’s son. Which message was more obvious? That the Soviet party-state representatives were mentioned first, that the rabbi’s son spoke only of ethnically generic “innocent people,” or that he did so as the rabbi’s son caught at a secret Jewish prayer meeting? The commission for the town and raion of Gorodok, which included the writer Vladimir Beliaev, dated its two-page report 8–12 October 1944. It found thousands of people shot and deported by the Germans. A detailed chronology of killings and abuse repeatedly identified the victims as Jews. The Gorodok report described the initial assault in 1941 as directed against the “peaceful population” and “especially its Jewish segment.” Other categories of victims, such as the intelligentsia or the party-state’s representatives, were absent. The only mention of those sent to Germany for labor exploitation was in the final summary and the only explicit mention of a non-Jew occurred when the witness Ignatii Zaizner, identified as “by nationality a Pole,” described the mass shooting of Jewish victims.87 In Lviv, as elsewhere, the published results of the Extraordinary State Commission’s work marginalized Jews and their exceptional suffering at German hands. Yet internal Soviet documents reveal the limits to this narrative suppression. On the contrary, local realities and memories intruded, contaminating the process of consigning them to oblivion. The Soviet regime wielded more than sufficient power to impose its rules, stories, and silences. But in doing so, it facilitated the articulation of alternatives, even within its own institutions. By then suppressing them, it signaled its intentions even as it delineated the repressed.

The Local Elite on Trial The Extraordinary State Commission disbanded in June 1951.88 Years before, the regime had suppressed local Jews’ attempts at commemoration through collecting survivors’ testimonies and plans for a monument.89 Even so, in 1948 the inhabitants of Lviv had witnessed the first—and for nearly two decades the last—major public trial in Lviv for crimes committed under the German occupation of the city. The trial, held before a military tribunal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, followed the general Soviet pattern, defining the crimes of the accused as betrayal of the motherland. Still, it had locally specific features. Its key message lay in the choice of the accused. The physician Oleksandr Barvinskyi was a prominent member of Lviv’s small pre-Soviet Ukrainian elite. He had worked under the first So-

176  tarik cyril amar

viet, the German, and the second Soviet occupation. The Soviet authorities welcomed him publicly right after their return.90 In 1946, Barvinskyi featured as “our correspondent” in a L´vovskaia pravda article on penicillin, a new quasi-miracle drug, here reported as coming from Moscow.91 One year later, in an internal kharakteristika report, Lviv Oblast Committee Chairman Ivan Hrushetskyi denounced Barvinskyi for hiding anti-Soviet attitudes: Barvinskyi had publicly welcomed the Germans as liberators from the “Bolshevik yoke,” called on Ukrainians to support the nationalists, worked for German intelligence as well as in health care, and been earmarked for a position in the abortive attempt at a Ukrainian nationalist government in 1941.92 The Soviet authorities also stepped up their attacks on other members of the Barvinskyi family, dead or alive. Oleksandr Barvinskyi’s trial in January 1948 displayed him and his “family of spies” as Ukrainian nationalists and Nazi collaborators, making Barvinskyi a “Ukrainian-German bourgeois nationalist” and “traitor to the Ukrainian people.” The list of Barvinskyi’s offenses included denouncing Soviet partisans, delivering representatives of the “most progressive part of the Polish population” to the Germans, and helping the Nazis collect “mythical information about ‘Bolshevik atrocities,’” recruit soldiers for the Waffen-SS Galician Division, and spy on and repress the “progressive” Ukrainian intelligentsia.93 Barvinskyi was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment, five years of deprivation of rights, and confiscation of property.94 The trial also produced fresh accusations against his wife and his brother. The significance of the Barvinskyi trial for Soviet discourse on the Holocaust in Lviv lay in its having nothing to say. This was the only public trial held in Lviv right after the war that made specific reference to the city. The choice of accused and accusations showed that the killing of the Jewish third of Lviv’s population was not a priority. Although “progressive” Poles and Ukrainians were mentioned as victims in the trial reporting, Jews were not. Vladimir Beliaev published two major articles on the trial in L´vovskaia pravda. He emphasized the Barvinskyi family’s elite status and depicted the notables of Lviv’s Ukrainian high society as morally degenerate traitors, nationalists, and gangsters. They had primarily victimized, in Beliaev’s version, young Ukrainians, whom they had cajoled into serving German intelligence. Beliaev was so keen to drive a wedge between the old elite and the young locals that he effectively provided an apology for working as a German spy or joining the Galicia Division. As long as these choices came in response to Barvinskyi’s machinations, the young soldiers and agents were described as seduced and compelled victims. Otherwise, Beliaev described the Germans’ victims as elite academics, physicians, and musicians. Although he

a disturbed silence 177

mentioned the Polish identity of some—if only in writing about events in Kraków, not in Lviv—he made no reference to either Jews or antisemitism.95

Writing the German Occupation Beliaev was not alone. In the postwar decades, a small number of writers stood out in articulating Lviv’s public memory of the German occupation. The place of the Holocaust in this writing remained obscure and at the same time obliquely substantial. During and right after the war, Korniichuk was not the only writer in Soviet Ukraine who referred to Jewish experiences. According to Myroslav Shkandrij, a small number of literary works produced by prominent authors mentioned German crimes against Jews and hinted at Ukrainian collaboration in those crimes. Yet even these comparatively direct references were removed before publication or marginalized or subordinated to generalizing Soviet narratives, so that “the theme of wartime Jewish suffering” remained “markedly underrepresented.”96 In and for Lviv, one of the most important writers to address the German occupation was Taras Myhal. Writing with the authority of experience, he painted a distorted but complex picture. As a young writer, Myhal had had his first publishing successes during the city’s Soviet occupation, between 1939 and 1941. According to Ostap Tarnavskyi, an unsympathetic fellow writer, Myhal stayed and thrived in Lviv under German occupation. When it ended, he fled west to escape the Soviet reconquest. After the war, he returned to Ukraine and was allowed to resume his writing career. Except for some minor ideological difficulties over an early postwar work featuring nationalist resistance in western Ukraine, he thrived once more, freely inventing incidents of communist resistance in German-occupied Lviv.97 Myhal was perhaps the single most productive local Soviet author writing about the German occupation of Lviv. He was certainly second to none among the small group publishing on the topic. His writing showed intriguing ambiguities. In 1957, he described the 1941 arrival of the Germans and their Ukrainian-nationalist auxiliaries, including how they hunted down Jews who were Communist Party members or “rich.” He added that nonJews, Russians, and Poles also made good targets as long as they were rich.98 While implying a special relationship between being rich or a Communist and being Jewish, Myhal privileged social factors over ethnicity. Myhal’s Jews were special, but, then again, not special enough to explain their being targeted as victims. While sketching “horrible pictures” of the Lviv ghetto, Myhal depicted the Judenrat (Jewish Council) in “slavish” submission and its murder as an “inglorious, slavish death.” In effect, he echoed Ukrainian nationalist propa-

178  tarik cyril amar

ganda that maligned Jewish victims as passive. Implicitly, Myhal’s Judenrat seemed to get what it deserved—a failure ascribed to class, not ethnicity. Yet there was some ambiguity here, too. Mixing socialist and quasi-biological language, Myhal characterized the Judenrat as representing a “class on the verge of extinction, the bourgeoisie, which already lacked the strength to fight the occupier.”99 Myhal did contrast the Judenrat’s way of dying with that of “Jewish workers,” who fell “weapon in hand.” This distinction hinted at options for resistance that few Jews had in reality. It only reinforced the assertion that to die without fighting was a disgrace. Myhal presented the Judenrat as essentially similar to Ukrainian collaboration organizations. In this view, the Germans had abused Jews and non-Jews in the same way. Any differences were only a “matter of time—everywhere where the Hitlerite occupiers ruled, ghettos would have been set up sooner or later for the Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian peoples.”100 Again Myhal was reproducing an element of Soviet discourse analogous to Ukrainian nationalist propaganda. The nationalists claimed that Bolsheviks would murder Ukrainians as Germans were murdering Jews; Myhal claimed that Germans were going to murder Ukrainians (and others) as they had already murdered Jews. Although the two accounts differed on the role played by the Bolsheviks, they agreed that there was nothing unique about the fate of the Jews. Myhal’s most extensive treatment of the Holocaust in Lviv was published in 1967. This series of texts—about 20 pages altogether—focused on a trial that began in Stuttgart in October 1966 and involved German Nazi perpetrators of crimes committed in Lviv. The article also discussed the December 1966 Lviv trial of six auxiliary camp guards from the Yanivska camp. In this context, Myhal gave a comparatively full description of German perpetrators and atrocities.101 There was no indication that these phenomena were part of a “final solution” of a “Jewish question.” Yet Myhal noted the camp guards’ “weakness for Jewish women” and that some of the camp inmates came from Lviv’s ghetto.102 Writing about the Stuttgart trial, Myhal mentioned the killing of “tens of thousands of persons of the Jewish population” and used, in another place and exceptionally, the word “genocide” (henotsyd).103 In “The Truth about the Yanivska Camp,” published in Vil´na Ukraina, Myhal described the camp as typical of Nazi camps since 1933, explaining that they all had had the same aim: the “spiritual and physical annihilation of all prisoners without exception,” a phrase that obliterated any distinction between often but not always lethal concentration camps and specialized death camps. Myhal also equated Nazi camps, including Auschwitz, with contemporary camps, as he wrote, “in South Africa, Spain, and so on.” While in-

a disturbed silence 179

sisting that the “whole truth” be remembered, Myhal did not mention either Jews or antisemitism.104 In general, the Lviv trial of 1966 received much media coverage. According to the Lviv oblast committee, reporters came from both local and central newspapers. Most of the trial proceedings were filmed.105 Vil´na Ukraina published several major articles on the trial. In October 1966, Ivan Fedorenko surveyed German crimes in Lviv. Although he identified himself as having worked for the Extraordinary State Commission in 1944 and called on his readers “never to forget” the “fascist crimes,” he did not mention the impending trial of the six Yanivska guards. Jews as Jews appeared only when he described a German perpetrator’s father as having hated “French, Swiss, [and] Jewish” professional competitors. Fedorenko wrote of “more than 200,000 peaceful Soviet people” killed. He described the German arrival in “ancient Ukrainian Lviv” as an invasion of German “scum,” avoiding discussion of the pogrom involving local perpetrators that had taken place at that moment. The first mass killing in his account occurred in August 1941—after the pogroms of early and late July— and targeted the old, children, and those unable to work. In an odd halftruth, Fedorenko detailed a second assault on people without papers, when in fact the target had been Jews. Papers demonstrating employment with an ever shrinking number of German enterprises or the German army did help some people escape immediate death, but the absence of papers was an incidental aspect of the killings, not the main motive for them. By substituting papers for antisemitism, Fedorenko depicted being targeted by the Germans as something that could have happened to anyone with equal probability and with the same consequences. He also introduced the Yanivska camp, but only as the destination for victims of the second roundup—that is, those without papers. Fedorenko provided some details on the camp and named several of its German perpetrators as well as witnesses who had testified before the Extraordinary State Commission. Yet this remained another account without Jews. Fedorenko added an oblique reference to Lviv’s ghetto without naming it, telling his readers that it was “unknown why the fascists needed to surround the quarters of the northern part of the city” with barbed wire.106 Clearly, this was not a mere “blank,” a space of ignorance, but a powerful statement. Here was an author who claimed special knowledge about German crimes in Lviv, who had taken part in the Extraordinary State Commission’s work, yet who asserted his ignorance rather than state what was generally known: that a large ghetto had existed in northern Lviv. This was repression as public spectacle, omission with a message.

180  tarik cyril amar

Fedorenko’s excision of the Jews—here literally from the map of Lviv— left a trace that hinted at the meaning it was not permitted to have. Vladimir Beliaev, another Extraordinary State Commission veteran, produced a similar effect when he published Formula of Poison, his reminiscences of Lviv, in 1970.107 His description of the city after the Soviet reconquest in 1944 emphasized the lingering effects of the German occupation in the minds of the occupied, their thinking in “German categories” of pervasive fear, distrust, and submissiveness. Beliaev, too, avoided any mention of Lviv’s Jews as Jews. He stripped his account of their Jewishness. He described a family of refugees who spent the German occupation in hiding in the forest and returned to Soviet Lviv broken and hopeless. He referred to the father only as a lawyer.108 He supplied extensive accounts in which the death brigade burned the remains of thousands of victims and wrote about its infamous machine for pulverizing bones. Indeed, immediately after the Soviet reconquest of Lviv, Beliaev had become acquainted with one of the few survivors of the unit, Leon WeliczkerWells. But although well placed to learn about the killing of Jews, he did not refer to Jews or German antisemitism in his writing. The blood spilled came from “one-third of the peaceful population” of Lviv, but Beliaev neither asked nor answered why this third and not another. In Beliaev’s book, the motivation for mass murder had to be sought in the exploitative interests of major German as well as British, French, and North American companies.109 Nevertheless, Beliaev did refer to Jews twice. First, he reported that as a lingering effect of the “pestilence” of German occupation, “people who meet a stranger quickly verify the person’s identity: Ukrainian, Russian, Pole, Jew? As if someone’s nationality were the principal measure of all other . . . qualities.”110 While ostentatiously criticizing nationalist prejudice, this list implied that a Jewish identity was no more fateful than any other. Beliaev’s second mention of Lviv’s Jews occurred in a story about German plunder, which escalated on the “day when the mass extermination of the Jews began.”111 The topic of plunder acted as a key, unlocking a rare glimpse of Jews as victims. Like Myhal, Beliaev here implies that Jews suffered because of their wealth, not their identity. Placement was also crucial. Beliaev had almost reached the end of his narrative before referring to the beginning of an event that exceeded in its consequences for the city everything that he had openly discussed before then. He did not simply leave out the incident, but neither did he include it in his reminiscences. Again, we should not interpret this ambiguity as just another position between the poles of suppression and recognition. For his readers, it was a complex message. How could a reader make sense of this striking and counterintuitive nar-

a disturbed silence 181

rative device? Clearly, it carried two important meanings. First, it decoded the omission of Jews from the preceding account, demonstrating its deliberate nature and thereby asserting that it was legitimate, even obligatory. This was a silence that made itself heard. It also established a specific relationship between the author’s knowledge and public statement and his readers’ knowledge and reception. Such an offhand reference to the mass extermination of the Jews revealed that extermination to be shared or common knowledge, but also marginal. Beliaev had already told his readers that a third of Lviv’s population had been murdered. Jews counted as numbers but not as Jews. Recognizing the magnitude of what had happened to them was conditional on pretending, in a genuinely perverse way, that it had not really happened to them. The sheer magnitude of their victimization was pressed into service to illustrate the horror of German occupation (and of radicalized capitalist interests) and the Soviet Union’s past and present achievements: the victory in World War II and the importance of Soviet strength in the Cold War. Yet Beliaev’s careful splitting of the (telling) numbers from the (untold) Jewish identity reaffirmed that even this imposed service to Soviet legitimacy and its population’s mobilization would not be rewarded with any recognition of the special suffering of Jews as targets of Nazi crimes.112

Inverting Rules, Confirming Stereotypes The most extensive Soviet treatment of the Holocaust in Lviv appeared in Roman Brodskii and Yulian Shulmeister’s Zionism—Weapon of Reaction, issued with a print run of 45,000 copies by Kameniar, a local publishing house, in 1976. As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, this period was marked by a propaganda campaign against Zionism. Thus, for 1978–79, a Lviv oblast KGB report listed 11 television and radio features, 20 articles, and 47 public lectures aimed at diminishing any desire to emigrate among the oblast’s Jews and at “compromising the reactionary essence of Zionism.”113 The declared purpose of Brodskii and Shulmeister’s book was to use Lviv’s archives to charge Zionism with complicity in the Polish interwar oppression of Ukrainians and with “collaboration in the . . . mass extermination of the Jewish population of western Ukraine.” In passing, the authors sought to demonstrate the strong presence of Jews among pre-Soviet exploiters and workers, as well as Lviv’s former role as a “bridgehead” and “nest” of Zionism.114 The work accused Zionists of working with Nazis and interwar antisemites to “chase [Jews] to Palestine.”115 Brodskii and Shulmeister confirmed the rules of Soviet discourse on the Holocaust by inverting them. As shown above, Jews were usually more de-

182  tarik cyril amar

ethnicized than others. Soviet discourse on victimization by Nazi crimes did not simply ignore ethnicity: it had a clear, focused, and easily decodable blind spot exactly where the Jews should have been. But Brodskii and Shulmeister offered the reader a comparatively—if selectively—archive-based publication that made Jews visible in a narrative about the Holocaust while presenting them not as victims but as co-perpetrators.116 They supplemented this inversion with another conditional rediscovery. Whereas Soviet discourse rarely acknowledged the Jewish past of western Ukraine, Brodskii and Shulmeister told their readers that the “most significant organizations” of Zionism had been based in “Poland and western Ukraine.”117 They also continued a trope of Soviet discourse by placing the German killing of the Jews in a larger context, foreseeing the same treatment for Poles and Ukrainians—the “final solution of the fate of the Ukrainian people”—although the “Jews were the first to be doomed.” In this reading, perceiving difference was criminal. Retrospective attempts to distinguish among Nazi victims were no better than what the fascists had done. Brodskii and Shulmeister established their own differences. Two collaborators inside the camp, Kampf and Tsimmerman, were described as Zionists.118 The only person accused of betraying Jews who were trying to pass by using “Aryan” papers, was a Jew. In effect, Jews were not merely equated with all other Yanivska victims, they were depicted as morally worse.119 In this picture, collaboration was Jewish; resistance not. In this way of looking at the world, collaboration was Jewish; resistance was not. In 1985, Shulmeister addressed the issue of resistance by making use of the Jewish communist poet Yakov Shudrikh, killed in Lviv during the Holocaust. According to Shulmeister, Shudrikh had led a small resistance group in the ghetto. Shulmeister contrasted this behavior with the passive response of other Jews and the collaboration of the Jewish police, which he identified with Zionism.120 Again, context trumped all. This unusual mention of Jewish resistance perverted an incident of exceptional openness into yet another attack on most Jews. It is difficult to distinguish Shulmeister’s story from Ukrainian nationalist admonitions not to permit oneself to be killed “like the Jews.”

The Reckoning Although Brodskii and Shulmeister supplied the most detail, perhaps the single most salient text produced about the Holocaust and Lviv appeared not long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Kameniar brought out Shulmeister’s 1987 novel Rasplata (The Reckoning). Rasplata was, in its odd

a disturbed silence 183

way, by far the most straightforward articulation of the issue not only of the Holocaust but of its legacy in Soviet Lviv. It was, in a sense, the Soviet last word on this topic. In Rasplata, Shulmeister constructed a multilayered narrative around two main motifs: the discovery and investigation in Soviet Lviv of Nazi collaborators hiding for more than three decades behind well-respected Soviet identities; and corruption in Soviet production and trade. Rasplata’s central villain, Nikolai Ivanovych Misiura, combines a wartime career of atrocities as a “traitor to the motherland” and a Yanivska camp guard with postwar success in corrupting the local Soviet economy in Lviv oblast. After being recognized by a surviving victim at a local party conference in the late 1970s, Misiura admits his wartime crimes first and his postwar corruption second. Shulmeister linked the corruption to a Lviv textile factory that featured prominently in Soviet anti-speculation trials in the early 1960s. The trials themselves were marked by implicit and clear antisemitism. At the same time, the last Lviv synagogue was closed in response to public accusations that it served as a cover for speculation.121 In Rasplata, Misiura owes his riches to his dealings with the factory. His partner in crime and manager there, Sigizmund Abramovich Aisenberg, is sentenced and executed, while Misiura remains undiscovered.122 Rasplata fuses the themes of anti-Soviet collaboration in the Holocaust with an antisemitically charged Soviet corruption and subversion narrative, and this fusion answers the novel’s fundamental question. Shortly after Misiura’s arrest, the investigating KGB officer wonders how Misiura could have prospered for so long in the Soviet Union. In contrast to West Germany, the officer thinks: “In a socialist society, there is no place for Nazi criminals, but Misiura has slyly found himself a very hospitable, not at all bad [place]. A cunning and clever opportunist, he was just right for somebody, turned out useful and necessary for somebody. What is that nourishing milieu for Misiura?”123 These musings go to the heart of postwar official Soviet self-understanding and its view of antifascism. Indeed, how could Misiura’s presence and prosperity be reconciled not only with communism but with the mythology of the Great Patriotic War? Could clever opportunists take advantage of the Soviet power won in World War II, especially in the Soviet west? A hundred dense pages after the question is raised, the reader receives an explanation of how Misiura can exist in the Soviet Union: the postwar “nourishing milieu” for a collaborating camp guard, whose murderous and proactive sadism Shulmeister amply illustrates, is a criminal and corrupting business relationship with Jews. In the world of Rasplata, this relationship—

184  tarik cyril amar

not any other part of his life story—enriched him, allowed him to infiltrate the Soviet order, and for decades protected him from retribution for his crimes during the Holocaust. ----In a competitive field of distortion and manipulation, Rasplata stood out. It marked not only a peak of bad faith but also a new twist in Soviet discourse on Nazi crimes and Jews. From the beginning, the regime refused to acknowledge the Nazis’ targeting of Jews. In stripping the victims of their Jewish identity and the crimes against them of their main motive, Soviet discourse ostentatiously aimed at an equality of victimhood while in fact treating Jews differently and signaling their difference and inferiority. Yet this was only the beginning, in more than a chronological sense. Throughout the Soviet period, the specific targeting of Jews during the Holocaust was not merely repressed. Repression conferred on Soviet discourse a monopoly on communication, thought, and imagination in the controlled public sphere, if not everywhere. At the same time, repression did not only excise or marginalize facts, memories, or ideas. A close reading of Soviet discourse reveals that it also contributed to the development of delusory and delusional, officially sanctioned narratives. In Lviv, these narratives did not erase memory of the Holocaust so much as offer a bizarre alternative. As the narratives developed their own tropes, their resonance was enhanced by their implicit convergence with traditional stereotypes and with motifs spread by Nazi and Ukrainian nationalist discourse. As mortal enemies, nationalists and Soviets could not admit that their discourses shared certain elements. Yet their noisy denial mattered less than their tacit agreement. Where they agreed, each reinforced the other’s narrative. Examples include the image of Jews dying shameful deaths while somehow being responsible for their own fate because of their failure to resist; the persistent assertion that what had happened to Jews was no different from that planned or done to non-Jews; and the stereotype of Jews as collaborators and agents of moral corruption, most brutally refashioned for Soviet discourse by Brodskii and Shulmeister. Where today we tend to emphasize the “communicative silencing” of Soviet rule, we ought to pay more attention to its communicative silences.124 In Soviet discourse—a complex, dynamic, and productive combination of the untold and the told, of statements that silenced and silences that made statements—the German genocide of the Jews was not a blank spot, an absence of memory. Instead, it was an anti-site, where memory was not suppressed but reshaped through a constant, resonant interaction of things said and unsaid.

9

The Holocaust in the East Participation and Presentation Zvi Gitelman

T

his book deals with two important issues: microhistories of violence against Jews during World War II perpetrated not by the Germans but by their neighbors (Dumitru, Shore, Solonari), and attempts to describe and analyze the inconsistent treatment of the Holocaust in Soviet media and internal reports during the war (Amar, Asher, Berkhoff, Sorokina). Both subjects deal with perceptions and presentations of history, as well as their presentday consequences. The detailed studies in this book draw on previously unknown archival sources to illustrate how the general population perceived Jews and how authorities based their policies at least partly on their assessments of those perceptions. These assessments were used to incite or deter action. Jewish survivors often remarked, with bitterness, on non-German or local participation in the murder of Jews during World War II. One could often hear, “The [Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Romanians, Hungarians et al.] were worse than the Germans.” Such talk, if scholars heard it at all, would likely have been dismissed as the emotionally driven perceptions of near-victims whose necessarily constricted ground-level view of the Holocaust could not be taken as reliable evidence. But the testimonies were there, even published. Over half a century before Jan Tomasz Gross’s deservedly famous Neighbors was published in Polish and English, the yizker buch (memorial book) of Grajewo (in Łomża province, near Szczuczyn and Radziłów and not far from Jedwabne, the focus of Gross’s book), described how in the summer of 1941, “we [Jews] were more afraid of the Poles than of the Germans. . . . During the 185

186  zvi gitelman

second week of the German occupation, the Poles in Szczuczyn shot Jewish men, women, and children around midnight, no fewer than 300 during the first Friday night.”1 The writer claimed that half the Jews of Szczuczyn were killed “not by the Germans but by the Polish murderers, their former neighbors, seemingly good friends and acquaintances. In the shtetl [of Radziłów], literally the entire Jewish population was burned to death by the Poles at one shot in the largest barn in the shtetl,” just as happened in Jedwabne.2 In Ukraine, Jews in villages, towns, and cities as large as Lwów/Lviv fell victim to their neighbors.3 So did those in Bessarabia and North Bukovina, as the chapters by Vladimir Solonari and Diana Dumitru illustrate in vivid detail. Politics played a role in what was reported and continues to influence our knowledge of what happened “on the ground.” Information about societal breakdown and local violence was applauded by the Germans but suppressed by the Soviets and their East European allies lest it cast doubts on the claims of druzhba narodov (friendship of the peoples) and proletarian internationalism. After the war, some perpetrator nations or states acknowledged their historical responsibility. Others did so many years after the war or still have not faced up to the facts. In the first category is Germany itself, which even assumed the burden of reparations and has for decades held its own people responsible for the Holocaust.4 Officials in Romania, Lithuania, Poland, and France have begun to acknowledge the complicity of some of their nationals. Bulgaria sticks to the myth of being a rescuer nation and state, though the reality was much more complex.5 Belarusian literature emphasizes the suffering of the Belarusian people and their resistance and seems to pay little attention to collaboration with the occupiers. Among the states that to this day are reluctant to confront the role of their peoples in wartime atrocities, including the murder of Jews, are Hungary, Japan, and, to some extent, Ukraine and the Baltic states. Aside from political considerations, a barrier to knowledge about local complicity in the Holocaust is that most of the Jewish testimonies and memoirs were given or written in Yiddish or Hebrew and so were inaccessible to many Western scholars. John-Paul Himka observes in his introduction to this book that in “the new historiography . . . Holocaust studies and East European studies have finally met intellectually.” This development is to be welcomed, of course. Curiously, many who are engaged in “Jewish studies” separate “Holocaust studies” from their own research. They may teach courses on the Shoah because they generally draw far more students than those in most fields of Jewish studies. But relatively few students and teachers of Jewish studies research the Holocaust, and American scholars in the field are more inclined to interpretation than to empirical investigation.

the holocaust in the east 187

Why is one of the most momentous events in the modern Jewish experience marginalized in Jewish studies? No doubt, there are individual and collective psychological reasons for this: if some non-Jews feel they “owe the Jews” a course on their greatest catastrophe for which the Christian world was responsible, some teachers of Jewish studies may feel that the Holocaust is an event for which others, not Jews, can be held responsible. Others may be reluctant to deal with the greatest Jewish catastrophe and failure in history. Moreover, they may think, the Holocaust is not about Jewish culture, texts, ideas, and practices that are the stuff of Judaica. Its explanations, if there are any, lie in German or European history, Christian theology, the modern totalitarian state, modern ideologies, or the political cultures of European peoples. The Holocaust should be taught in history courses, not in an ethnic studies program or in political science courses on totalitarianism or sociology courses on racism and ethnic relations. There is a good argument for this: the Shoah should not be sloughed off from mainstream courses and departments to “ethnic studies.” It would be as if slavery in the United States were taught only in African-American studies and not in U.S. history courses. That the Shoah is a part of European or world history, however, does not mean that it is not part of Jewish history and that it does not have its place in Jewish thought, in the sociology of the Jews, and even in their political behavior. This would seem blatantly obvious. Yet few graduate students working in Jewish studies choose some aspect of the Holocaust for their dissertation work. This seems to be true in Europe and Israel as well as in the United States, perhaps less so in Canada. Thus, Jewish studies seems even more separated from Holocaust studies than it is from East European studies. One consequence is that much of the material reflecting the perceptions of those who experienced the Holocaust remains closed off from those who do not read Jewish languages, while the research of those who do read the languages is not often on the Holocaust.6 Nevertheless, this book does a great deal to uncover hitherto unknown aspects of the Holocaust in the east. The work of the authors shows how useful micro-history can be in showing how large historical processes actually worked on the ground. This makes it easier to grasp the realities faced by individuals and groups, realities that are sometimes clouded by numbers we cannot grasp. This is history wie es eigentlich gewesen. “Small stories” suggest far larger stories and make them meaningful and comprehensible. As Tim Cole points out, they also “have the potential to nuance and challenge bigger stories, revealing greater complexity and pointing to power lying not only at the center.”7

188  zvi gitelman

The micro-histories described and analyzed by Marci Shore, Diana Dumitru, and Vladimir Solonari show that the motivations of neighbors who robbed and killed Jews were quite varied. Marci Shore asks “how to apportion causality between prewar antisemitism and the Soviet occupation” in trying to explain antisemitic behavior. The chapters show that both of these may have been more important in Poland than in Romania. If antisemitism and the myth of Judeo-communism (żydokomuna) seemed to be the driving forces of pogroms in the part of Poland taken by the Soviets in 1939, in the Romanian territories annexed by the Soviets it was mainly greed and peer pressure that caused the same behavior; antisemitism and ideology played much less of a role. Solonari concludes, “No traces of ideological antisemitism could be found in the files—only evidence of greed, inbred cruelty, and opportunism.” Dumitru, in a chapter that has not appeared previously in Kritika, also finds no evidence that the killing of Jews was motivated by revenge for collaboration with the Soviets. “Bessarabian villagers did not necessarily perceive Jews as communist supporters.” That is very different from western Ukraine and the Baltic states. In what had been Romania, much of the violence was carried out by groups, sometimes including families. The perpetrators in Bessarabia in 1941 did not differ in any significant way from their peers. They were, in Christopher Browning’s sense, “ordinary men.” In this, they probably did resemble their counterparts in Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic region—as becomes apparent when neglected sources are mined. Solonari examined 900 testimonies by surviving Jews in Chernivtsi; Dumitru did the same with trial records that she cannot access in her home city of Chişinău but can read at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A second group of authors examines how Soviet authorities formulated policies toward reporting the Holocaust. Their approach seem to have been based largely on their perceptions of how such policies would be understood or interpreted. Not surprisingly, the regime based its policies not on humanitarian considerations but on political calculations. But what those calculations were is not altogether clear. All the authors agree that the central government probably issued no single directive, or even a series of directives, to the media and the organs of power regarding the official line to be taken toward the Holocaust. As Karel Berkhoff puts it succinctly, “Although Soviet media items often attempted to conceal that the Nazis were deliberately killing all the Jews, this concealment never became a policy. It was nothing but a tendency that never became entirely consistent.” He documents this process in detail and notes, “Even as late as August 1944 there was no top-level deci-

the holocaust in the east 189

sion, in writing or not, to omit Jews completely from media reports about the victims of the Nazis.” Several authors note inconsistences in Soviet reporting on the Holocaust. In the absence of written policy directives and clear evidence of oral guidelines, they speculate on the reasons for these inconsistencies. Harvey Asher and others attempt explanations that are based on rational policy decisions. Marina Sorokina argues that the Extraordinary State Commission reports were intended for foreign consumption and at times deliberately falsified for that reason. Sorokina shows how reports were edited and made “politically correct.” For example, in reports from Stavropol krai, “All the original documents talked about the total destruction by the Nazis of the Jewish population of the krai, but the commission report routinely changed such references to ‘Soviet people,’ ‘Soviet children,’ or ‘Soviet citizens.’” Such distortions may have resulted from calculations about domestic, not just foreign, reception. Sorokina and others do not take note of investigative commissions that arrived at liberated areas before the branches of the Extraordinary State Commission could do so. These earlier reports seem less politically crafted and more spontaneous and undoctored. It would be instructive to compare the reports of those commissions, which usually gathered their material within days of the liberation of a town or village, with the chronologically later and more politically guided Extraordinary State Commission reports. Asher asserts that Ilya Altman and Claudio Ingerflom “convincingly demonstrate that Kremlin policy was not static in the 1933–1945 period. Sometimes it was dominated by ideology, at other times by contingency; most often it was a combination of both.” Downplaying the Shoah was not so much a reflection of antisemitism as it was due to playing up Russian patriotism and heroism. Asher speculates that “analogies between the Nazi deportation of the Jews and Soviet transfers of entire nationalities” were another reason not to highlight the Shoah. The authors seem to agree that reporting—or not reporting—about Jews and their suffering was mostly a calculated political decision—although some, like the ideological supervisor Georgii Aleksandrov, were clearly antisemitic and may have been motivated by their feelings. Larger considerations might also explain the inconsistencies in Soviet publications and public announcements as much as rational calculation or feelings toward Jews. First, in the absence of a written directive or directives, editors and broadcasters may have had a freer hand than we imagine in what we have always seen as a highly centralized, totalitarian system. In the chaos of wartime, Soviet controls had weakened, and authorities had many pressing issues to address

190  zvi gitelman

simultaneously. That may have allowed individual proclivities and local calculations about how a story might play—either with the population or with the higher authorities—to be decisive. Second, as the Soviets marched westward and drew closer to countries where antisemitism was quite widespread (Poland, the Axis allies Romania and Hungary), they became increasingly reluctant to feature the suffering of the Jews.8 The same point applies to the vast Soviet territories that had been under Nazi control and propaganda for a few of the war years. Most important, as some of the authors mention, as the scale of German atrocities against Soviet civilians became known (ca. 18,000,000 civilian deaths), the enormity of the atrocities against Jews paled somewhat. In Western Europe and Germany itself, in contrast, only the Jews were singled out for mass annihilation. Perhaps the inconsistency of Soviet reporting was calculated (although probably not) because utter disregard of the Jewish fate would have meant a loss of media and government credibility, but making it a central issue would “give the war to the Jews”—“taking it” from the Russians, confirming Nazi propaganda that the country was run by a żydokomuna, and diminishing the will to fight. Tarik Amar’s essay, also not previously published in Kritika, makes a subtle, original argument. Like Sorokina, Amar concludes that at least the published reports of the Extraordinary State Commission “marginalized Jews and their exceptional suffering at German hands.” But the interaction between limited, guarded, selective Soviet official reporting of the Holocaust, on the one hand, and fairly widespread knowledge of it by ordinary citizens who gained that knowledge informally and by direct experience, on the other, led some people to question the official line. Using Lviv as an illustration, Amar finds that officially generated information eclipsed the Jewish identity of Nazi victims but sometimes simultaneously made it clear. Thus, newspapers and books described the Janówska camp in Lviv without reference to Jews but at the same time described the horrendous conditions of the city’s Jewish ghetto. This amounted to, in Amar’s words, an “imperfect silence.” “Local realities and memories intruded, contaminating the consignment of the truth to oblivion.” Amar concludes that the “Soviet discourse [was] a complex, dynamic, and productive combination of the untold and the told, of statements that silenced and silences that made statements.” The German genocide of Jews “was not a blank spot, an absence of memory. Instead, it was an anti-site, where memory was not suppressed but reshaped through a constant, resonant interaction of things said and unsaid.”

the holocaust in the east 191

This book combines painstaking empirical research in Soviet media and archives with well-informed analysis and, yes, intelligent speculation about complex issues. Even if we can understand the passions and ideas that drove the Nazis in their war on Judeo-Bolshevism, as they perceived it, why did some local people participate in mass murder? And what explains the inconsistent, seemingly ambivalent attitudes and policies of the greatest enemy of the Nazis toward the Nazis’ greatest victim? The authors do not provide definitive answers to these questions, but they move the inquiry very far along.

NOTES

Preface: The Holocaust as a Part of Soviet History 1. These figures come from Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 524–25. For treatments of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union in the context of the history of Russian and Soviet Jewry, using Yiddish and other sources, see Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); and Zvi Gitelman, ed., Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 2. The phrase comes from Father Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Landmark publications, whose dates of publication suggest how rapidly the literature has developed, include Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman, eds., The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). For a notable compilation, see Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, eds., The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 3. Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1957); Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964). 4. For a more extended consideration of this consensus and its implications, see my “World War II in the Pages of Kritika, 2000–2012: Shaking Up the InternalistStructuralist Consensus,” presented at the conference “World War II, Nazi Crimes, and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,” Moscow, December 2012. 5. Amir Weiner, “Saving Private Ivan: From What, Why, and How?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 2 (2000): 306–7. 6. Michael David-Fox, “The Implications of Transnationalism,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 4 (2011): 885–904; Bogdan Iacob, “Is It Transnational? A New Perspective in the Study of Communism,” East Central Europe (forthcoming).

193

194  notes to pages x–xii 7. For example, Richard Bidlack, “Lifting the Blockade on the Blockade: New Research on the Siege of Leningrad,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 2 (2009): 333–51; see also Roger D. Markwick, “Stalinism at War,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 3 (2002): 509–20. 8. In this category, see Daniel Peris, “‘God Is Now on Our Side’: The Religious Revival on Unoccupied Soviet Territory during World War II,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (2000): 97–118. 9. For example, see Alfred J. Rieber, “Civil Wars in the Soviet Union,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 1 (2003): 129–62; Serhy Yekelchyk, “Stalinist Patriotism as Imperial Discourse: Reconciling the Ukrainian and Russian ‘Heroic Pasts,’ 1939–1945,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 1 (2002): 51–80; Alexander Statiev, “The Nature of the Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance, 1942–44: The North Caucasus, the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, and Crimea,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 2 (2005): 285–318. 10. Oleg Budnitskii, “The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 3 (2009): 629–82. 11. See, for example, Catherine Epstein, “Nazi Occupation Strategies,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 1 (2009): 107–20. Important early studies in what is now a large literature include Bernhard Chiari, Alltag hinter der front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weissrussland 1941–1944 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998); Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999); Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). The decline of the domestic isolationism and internalist qualities of Soviet historiography are nowhere more clearly indicated than in the publication in Kritika of a long list of Germanists. In addition to Epstein, these have included Omer Bartov, Michael Geyer, Jeffrey Herf, Robert Gellatelly, and others. 12. A notable study in this fast-paced area of scholarship area is Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 13. Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); see the discussion by John-Paul Himka in this volume. 14. For an earlier intervention in a U.S. Slavics journal on the last topic, see Tanja Penter, “Collaboration on Trial: New Source Material on Soviet Postwar Trials against Collaborators,” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (2005): 782–90. 15. For treatments that include overviews of the existing literature, see Dennis Deletant, “Transnistria and the Romanian Solution to the ‘Jewish Problem,’” in The Shoah in Ukraine, 156–89; and Vladimir Solonari, Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 16. Diana Dumitru and Carter Johnson, “Constructing Interethnic Conflict and Cooperation: Why Some People Harmed Jews and Others Helped Them during the Holocaust in Romania,” World Politics 63, no. 1 (2011): 1–42.

notes to pages 1–3 195 Chapter 1. Introduction: A Reconfigured Terrain 1. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 2. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 384. 3. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 4. See, e.g., Dieter Pohl, “Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Western Ukraine—A Research Agenda,” in Shared History—Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941, ed. Eleazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007), 305–13; Christoph Mick, “Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and Jewish Occupation, 1939–1944,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 2 (2011): 336–63; Wendy Lower, “Pogroms, Mob Violence, and Genocide in Western Ukraine, Summer 1941: Varied Histories, Explanations, and Comparisons,” Journal of Genocide Research 13, no. 3 (2011): 217–46; John-Paul Himka, “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 53, nos. 2–4 (2011): 209–43; and Kai Struve, “Rites of Violence? The Pogroms of Summer 1941,” Polin 24 (2012): 257–74. 5. Natalia Aleksiun, “The Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, 1944–1947,” Polin 20 (2008): 74–97. 6. See, e.g., Omer Bartov, “Wartime Lies and Other Testimonies: Jewish-Christian Relations in Buczacz, 1939–1944,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 3 (2011): 486–511. 7. As a useful supplement to Berkhoff’s detailed study, see Maxim D. Shrayer, “Jewish-Russian Poets Bearing Witness to the Shoah, 1941–1946: Textual Evidence and Preliminary Conclusions,” in Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, ed. Stefano Garzonio, 59–119 (www.pecob.eu/Studies-in-Slavic-Languages-and-Literatures, accessed 12 November 2012).

Chapter 2. Conversing with Ghosts: Jedwabne, Żydokomuna, and Totalitarianism I am grateful to Daniel Cohen, Norman Naimark, Timothy Snyder, Stephanie Steiker, and the editors of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History for comments on earlier versions of this essay, and to the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna for its hospitality. Since this chapter was published in 2005, a significant amount of new literature has been published relating to both the Jedwabne debate in particular and the larger issues surrounding it. Some of the most important publications include Andrzej Żbikowski, U genezy Jedwabnego: Żydzi na Kresach Północno-Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej, wrzesień 1939–lipiec 1941 (Warszaw: Żydowski Insytut historyczny, 2006); Jan T. Gross, Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006), Polish edition Jan Tomasz Gross, Strach: Antisemityzm w Polsce tuż po wojnie (Kraków: Znak, 2008); M. Gądek, ed., Wokół “Strachu”: Dyskusja o książce Jana T. Grossa (Kraków: Znak, 2008); Piotr Forecki, Od “Shoah” do “Strachu”: Spory o polsko-żydowską przeszłość i pamięć w debatach publicznych (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2010); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Monika Adamczyk-Grabowska and Feliks Tych, eds., Następstwa zagłady Żydow: Polska 1944–2010

196  notes to page 6 (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2011); Barbara Engelking, Jest taki piękny słoneczny dzień: Losy Żydów szukających ratunku na wsi polskiej 1942–1945 (Warsaw: Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów IFiS PAN, 2011); Jan Grabowski, Judenjagd: Polowanie na Żydów 1942–1945 (Warsaw: Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów IFiS PAN, 2011); Jan Tomasz Gross with Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Złote żniwo (Kraków: Znak, 2011), published in English as Golden Harvest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Maciej Gablankowski, ed., Wokół “Złotych Żniw”: Debata o Ksiażce Jana Tomasza Grossa i Ireny Grudzińskiej-Gross (Kraków: Znak, 2011). In July 2011, the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny devoted an issue to revisiting the Jedwabne debate: “Polacy i Żydzi: po Jedwabnem, po ‘Sąsiadach,’” Tygodnik Powszechny, 10 July 2011. In August 2011, an issue of East European Politics and Societies (25, no. 3) was largely devoted to publishing the papers from an October 2010 Princeton University conference titled “The Holocaust in Occupied Poland: New Findings and New Interpretations.” See in particular Krzysztof Persak, “Jedwabne before the Court: Poland’s Justice and the Jedwabne Massacre—Investigations and Court Proceedings, 1947–1974,” 410–32. Much of the new research has been conducted with the support of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research (Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów) at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, established in 2003. It is worth mentioning as well that an extraordinary play inspired by the Jedwabne story premiered in Poland in 2008; in 2010, Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Nasza klasa won the Nike Literary Prize in Poland. See Tadeusz Słobodzianek, Nasza klasa (Gdańsk: Słowo/obraz terytoria, 2010), published in English as Our Class, trans. Ryan Craig (London: Oberon Books, 2009). 1. A twenty-third, Józef Sobuta, was tried in 1953 and acquitted. 2. See Andrzej Rzepliński, “Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej? Sprawy karne oskarżonych o wymordowanie Żydów w Jedwabnem w świetle zasady rzetelnego procesu,” in Wokół Jedwabnego, ed. Paweł Machcewicz and Krzystof Persak, 2 vols. (Warszawa: Instytut pamięci narodowej, 2002), 1:422–32. Cited hereafter as WJ. 3. Jan T. Gross, Sąsiedzi: Historia zag łady żydowskiego miasteczka (Sejny: Pogranicze, 2000), published in English as Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Gross was then a professor in the Department of Politics at New York University. He is currently a professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. When public interest in Jedwabne grew, Fundacja pogranicze, the publisher of Sąsiedzi, made the text available free of charge on the Internet. Pogranicze also began an online bibliography of published responses to the book, with links to the full texts of those writings. 4. Gross, Neighbors, 87–89; Gross, Sąsiedzi, 63–64. 5. There had likewise been little response on at least two occasions when Polish journalists had written about the Jedwabne massacre. In 1988, Danuta and Aleksander Wroniszewscy, journalists in the Łomża area, published the article “. . . aby żyć” (so as to live) in the Łomża weekly Kontakty, no. 27 (1988). After having read Jan Gross’s essay about Szmul Wasersztajn’s testimony in Europa nieprowincjonalna, the journalist Andrzej Kaczyński went to Jedwabne to ask the townspeople about the story. He describes what he discovered in “Całopalenie,” Rzeczpospolita, no. 104 (2000) (translated in Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003] under the title “Burnt Offering”). The chronologies provided at the end of both Polonsky and Michlic, The Neighbors Respond, 451–58, and WJ 1:464–88, note these and other relevant

notes to pages 6–8 197 publications. Also see Tomasz Szarota, “Mord w Jedwabnem: Dokumenty, publikacje i interpretacje z lat 1941–2000,” in WJ 1:461–63. 6. “Diabelskie szczegóły (Jacek Żakowski rozmawia z Tomaszem Szarotą),” Gazeta Wyborcza, 18–19 November 2000. Jacek Żakowski published his own response at the same time: “Każdy sąsiad ma imię,” in ibid. 7. Quoted in Jan T. Gross, Wokół Sąsiadów: Polemiki i wyjaśnienia (Sejny: Pogranicze, 2003), 16. Originally published as the opening line of Żakowski, “Każdy sąsiad ma imię.” 8. Paweł Machcewicz, “Wokół Jedwabnego,” in WJ 1:10. 9. Gross, Neighbors, 77–78; Gross, Sąsiedzi, 55–56. 10. Gross, Sąsiedzi, 90; Gross, Neighbors, 133. 11. Gross, Sąsiedzi, 23–24, 59; Gross, Neighbors, 30–32, 82. On the question of why the Polish defendants retracted their testimonies, Tomasz Strzembosz, for instance, believes that in front of the judge they felt safe and began to tell the truth. Gross theorizes that more likely between January and May they grew frightened and began to lie—that is, they were threatened by their neighbors and by the remaining nationalist underground, which was known to issue death threats (Wokół Sąsiadów, 75). He cites as well a 1956 letter written from prison by Jerzy Laudański, one of the 12 men found guilty in the 1949 trial, in which Laudański asks the authorities why he is sitting in prison when he never collaborated with the Germans. This was in a sense, Gross notes, a perfectly logical argument: for Laudański was indicted on a paragraph about collaboration with the occupier, whereas in his mind, in murdering Jews, he had not collaborated with any occupier but rather had cooperated with his own neighbors (Sąsiedzi, 82; Neighbors, 118–21). 12. Gross, Wokół Sąsiadów, 15. 13. Gross, Neighbors, 142; Gross, Sąsiedzi, 95. 14. A very good, more extensive overview is given in Aleksander Smolar, “Jews as a Polish Problem,” Daedalus 116, no. 2 (1987): 31–73. 15. See Richard Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939–1944 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986); his subsequent exchange with David Engel, “Poles, Jews, and Historical Objectivity,” Slavic Review 46, nos. 3–4 (1987): 568–80; and Richard Lukas, “A Response,” Slavic Review 46, nos. 3–4 (1987): 581–90. 16. See William Hagen, “Before the ‘Final Solution’: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Antisemitism in Interwar Germany and Poland,” Journal of Modern History 68, no. 2 (1996): 1–31; and Ezra Mendelsohn, “Interwar Poland: Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews?” in The Jews in Poland, ed. Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk, and Antony Polonsky (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 130–39. 17. Jakub Berman, together with Hilary Minc (also of Jewish origin) and Bolesław Bierut, was part of a triumvirate of Stalinist leaders of postwar Poland. Cultural policy and the security apparatus both fell under Jakub Berman’s jurisdiction in the Stalinist years. On Jakub Berman, see Marci Shore, “Children of the Revolution: Communism, Zionism, and the Berman Brothers,” Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 23–86. 18. On the participation of Jews in Poland’s communist regime, see Krystyna Kersten, Polacy, Żydzi, Komunizm: Anatomia półprawd 1939–1968 (Warsaw: Niezależna oficynja wydawnicza, 1992). Also see the sociological study by Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). The complicated story of the participation of Polish Jews in the Polish communist movement and later the communist regime had its epilogue in the “anti-Zionist” campaign of March 1968. See Dariusz Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna

198  notes to pages 8–11 1967–1968 (Warsaw: Instytut studiów politycznych Polskiej akademii nauk, 2000). Also see Stola’s contribution to the Jedwabne debate titled “Jedwabne: How Was It Possible?” in The Neighbors Respond, 386–400. 19. Gross, Neighbors, 43–44; Gross, Sąsiedzi, 31–32. 20. Gross, Neighbors, 47–53; Gross, Sąsiedzi, 33–37. On the end of the Kobielno conspiracy Gross cites Strzembosz, Jasiewicz, and Wierzbicki. See also Jan J. Milewski, “Polacy i Żydzi w Jedwabnem i okolicy przed 22 czerwca 1941 roku,” in WJ 1:78–79. 21. Gross, Sąsiedzi, 41, 102–5; Gross, Neighbors, 55, 152–55. Gross cites in particular a July 1941 telegram by Stefan Grot Rowecki. Reports by Rowecki and Jan Karski to the Polish government-in-exile in London concerning Polish attitudes toward the Jews, the Germans, and the Soviets can be found in WJ 2. 22. Gwido Zlatkes and Antony Polonsky, “Polin znaczy Polska: Z profesorem Antonym Polonskym, wybitnym historykiem polsko-żydowskim, redaktorem naczelnym ‘Polinu’ rozmawia Gwido Zlatkes,” Midrasz, no. 5 (1997). 23. The Łomża region, of which Jedwabne is a part, was exceptional within the Sovietoccupied kresy in that Poles comprised the ethnic majority. 24. On ethnic cleansing as a phenomenon of twentieth-century Europe, see Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 25. See Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Snyder, “‘To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All’: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 2 (1999): 86–120; and Snyder, “The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing, 1943,” Past and Present 179 (May 2003): 197–234. 26. Gross, Sąsiedzi, 105–13; Gross, Neighbors, 152–67. Gross makes this argument for both cases: that is, for the participation of Soviet collaborators in the Nazi occupation and subsequently for the participation of Nazi collaborators in the postwar communist system. 27. Gross, Neighbors, 116–17; Gross, Sąsiedzi, 80. 28. Gross, Sąsiedzi, 85; Gross, Neighbors, 124–25. 29. Jan T. Gross, Polish Society under German Occupation: The Generalgouvernement, 1939–1944 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 257. 30. Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belarus (1988; 2nd ed., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 31. Ibid., 35. 32. Ibid., 37. 33. Ibid., 220–21. On the deportations, see also Jan T. Gross and Irena GrudzińskaGross, War through Children’s Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939–1941 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1981); and Katherine Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). 34. Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 185. 35. Ibid., 230. 36. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1979). 37. Gross’s discussion of lawlessness also provides an interesting comparison to Arendt’s

notes to pages 11–15 199 discussion of “stateless people,” who, deprived of citizenship, lived completely without rights. In Arendt’s reading, these atomized individuals outside citizenship came to be regarded as subhuman; she argues that the creation of such a category was a prerequisite to the emergence of totalitarianism. See chapter 9, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” in Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 267–302. 38. Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 239. 39. Ibid., 67. 40. Ibid., 117. 41. Ibid., 120. 42. As one of my graduate students pointed out in a seminar, one reads Neighbors very differently after reading Revolution from Abroad first. Nor was Neighbors a recantation; Gross worked with Princeton University Press to publish a new edition of Revolution from Abroad at the same time as Neighbors appeared. The 2002 expanded edition of Revolution from Abroad includes a new preface by the author and the appendix essay, “The Tangled Web.” 43. Jan T. Gross, Upiorna dekada: Trzy eseje na temat wzajemnych relacji między Żydami, Polakami, Niemcami i komunistami w latach 1939–1948 (1998; repr., Kraków: Universitas, 2001). The content of Upiorna dekada is largely revisited in Gross’s “The Tangled Web.” 44. Gross, Upiorna dekada, 21. 45. Ibid., 50. 46. Jan T. Gross, “‘Ten jest z Ojczyzny mojej. . .’, ale go nie lubię,” in ibid., 25–60. This material, in a slightly different form, was originally published in Gross, “Polish-Jewish Relations during the War: An Interpretation,” European Journal of Sociology 27, no. 2 (1986): 199–214. In English Gross writes, “The Poles lived dangerously in those days and were proud of it.” 47. Jan T. Gross, “‘Ja za takie oswobodzenie im dziękuję, i proszę ich żeby to był ostatni raz,’” in Upiorna dekada, 61–92. This essay is reprinted under the same title in Gross, Wokół Sąsiedzi, 27–48. 48. Italics added. In the original: “Czy to była po prostu kolejna fala emigracji za chlebem? A jeśli nie, jeśli to była ucieczka całego narodu przed prześladowaniami, to co to o nas mówi?” (Gross, Upiorna dekada, 113). 49. See “Polacy i Żydzi w upiorniej dekadzie,” Więź, no. 7 (1999): 4–22. 50. In Wokół Sąsiadów, Gross expresses gratitude to the descendants of the Jedwabne Jews for accepting this year-long delay, having been persuaded by Gross’s argument that this was above all a fragment of Polish history and Poland first should be given a chance to grapple with Jedwabne on its own (24). 51. “Namely,” Gross writes, “I would argue that the statements ‘A’ and ‘not A’ cannot be simultaneously true” (ibid., 16–17). 52. Gross, Sąsiedzi, 11–14; Gross, Neighbors, 16–20; see also Gross, Wokół Sąsiadów, 13. 53. Gross, Sąsiedzi, 15; Gross, Neighbors, 21. In the book, he tells of how it was only when watching an interview (filmed by Agnieszka Arnold) with the daughter of the man who owned the barn in which Jedwabne’s Jews were burned, that he absorbed the reality of what had occurred. 54. See, for instance, “Poduszka pani Marx,” in Gross, Wokół Sąsiadów, 19–25. 55. Ibid., 98, 101. 56. John Connelly, “Poles and Jews in the Second World War: The Revisions of Jan T.

200  notes to pages 16–18 Gross,” Contemporary European History 11, no. 4 (2002): 641–58. Specifically, Connelly points to Gross’s shifts from a separation between Polish Jews and the remainder of Polish society in his first book to his present insistence that such a separation is impossible; from a portrayal of the Nazi occupation as rescuing moral values to a portrayal of Polish society as demoralized by occupation; and from an emphasis on Polish resistance to the Nazis to an emphasis on Polish welcoming of the Nazis. It may be a misreading, I believe, to categorize this last point as a straightforward “revision.” The Poles Gross portrays in Polish Society under German Occupation as resisting the Nazis were those in the Generalgouvernement, which came under Nazi occupation immediately in September 1939. In contrast, the Poles Gross portrays in Neighbors as welcoming the Nazis were Poles in the eastern territories who spent 21 months under Soviet occupation before the Nazis arrived in June 1941. These are two quite different cases. 57. Gross, Polish Society under German Occupation, 292. 58. Anna Bikont’s remarkable investigative journalism is now compiled in the book, written in diary form, My z Jedwabnego [We from Jedwabne] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Prószyński i s-ka, 2004). 59. Among the omitted voices is, for instance, Marek Chodakiewicz. See Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Żydzi i Polacy 1918–1955: Współistnienie-zagłada-komunizm (Warsaw: Biblioteka Frondy, 2000); and Chodakiewicz, After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs with Columbia University Press, 2003). 60. Marta Kurkowska-Budzan, “My Jedwabne,” in The Neighbors Respond, 200–6. 61. The volume of documents is over 1,000 pages long and contains some 440 documents divided into ten sections: Soviet documents on the attitude of the population and the Polish underground in the region including Jedwabne in 1939–1941; accounts of Polish citizens who had experienced repression concerning the social situation and Polish-Jewish relations under Soviet occupation in this region; documents of the Polish Underground State about the situation in the region after 22 June 1941; German documents concerning the activities of operational detachments of the German Security Police and Security Service in the area in the summer of 1941; accounts of Jewish survivors concerning the fates of the Jewish population in the region after 22 June 1941; documents of the 1947–1949 civil proceedings regarding the dead Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne; documents from the 1949 trial; documents from the 1953 trial of Józef Sobuta; documents from the 1967–1974 investigation concerning crimes against the Jewish population in Jedwabne conducted by the District Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Białystok; and selected documents of criminal trials in 1945–1958 involving cases of crimes against the Jewish population in Radziłów, a town neighboring Jedwabne. Documents originally in Yiddish, German, and Russian are all published here in Polish translation. The volume includes a biographical appendix as well as English summaries of each section of documents. 62. This first volume of studies includes maps, photographs, English abstracts, and a detailed chronology of both the 1941 events in Jedwabne and the events and publications following from them. 63. Andrzej Żbikowski, “Pogromy i mordy ludności żydowskiej w Łomżyńskiem i na Białostocczyźnie latem 1941 roku w świetle relacji ocalałych Żydów i dokumentów sądowych,” in WJ 1:231. 64. Ibid., 1:354. 65. Leon Kieres, “Przedmowa,” in WJ 1:7.

notes to pages 18–21 201 66. Marek Wierzbicki posits that pogroms happened where there was a clear dominant ethnic group. The Łomża area and western Białostocczyzna were the only entirely ethnically Polish territories (excepting the Jewish minority) in the Soviet occupation zone. See Machcewicz, “Wokół Jedwabnego,” WJ 1:32. 67. Żbikowski uses immediate postwar accounts of Jewish survivors together with documentation from 61 postwar trials and investigations (all involving charges on the basis of the PKWN’s August Decree). Documents of the Polish Underground State that also contain references to the local population’s participation in these pogroms can be found in WJ 2. 68. WJ 1:260, 266. 69. WJ 1:211, 253. 70. WJ 1:436, 458. 71. WJ 1:50–51. 72. Marcin Urynowicz, “Ludność żydowska w Jedwabnem: Zmiany demograficzne od końca XIX wieku do 1941 roku na tle regionu łomżyńskiego,” in WJ 1:97, 104. 73. On this topic, see also Norman Naimark, “The Nazis and ‘The East’: Jedwabne’s Circle of Hell,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (2002): 476–82. A document signed the day after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war by the prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile in London, Władysław Sikorski, warns Poles in the now formerly Soviet territories not to submit to German instigation to engage in violence against Jews (Edmund Dmitrów, “Oddziały operacyjne niemieckiej Policji Bezpieczeństwa i Służby Bezpieczeństwa a początek zagłady Żydów w Łomżyńskiem i na Białostocczyźnie latem 1941 roku,” in WJ 1:284, 293–95). 74. WJ 1:17. 75. WJ 1:40. 76. See Jan J. Milewski, “Polacy i Żydzi w Jedwabnem i okolicy przed 22 czerwca 1941 roku,” and Dariusz Libionka, “Duchowieństwo diecezji łomżyńskiej wobec antysemityzmu i zagłady Żydów,” in WJ 1:63–81 and 105–28, respectively. 77. WJ 1:69. 78. WJ 1:46. 79. Wierzbicki’s article relies somewhat more than the others on secondary sources. 80. Wierzbicki, “Stosunki polsko-żydowskie na Zachodniej Białorusi w latach 1939–1941,” in WJ 1:153. 81. WJ 1:143. Wierzbicki notes, for instance, that the nationalization of property and industry; the liquidation of Jewish institutions that had overseen religious schools, synagogues, and cemeteries; and the closing of Hebrew schools resulted in pauperization, the destruction of all Jewish communal infrastructure, dependence on the state, and the loss of national identity (144). 82. WJ 1:156–57. Wierzbicki also writes of his lack of understanding as to why Gross does not mention relief over the end of the Soviet occupation in discussing the Poles’ reception of the Germans. In Wierzbicki’s opinion, Gross falsely equates the Jews’ positive reception of the Red Army with the Poles’ positive reception of the Germans. The Jews never experienced extermination at the hands of the Polish government before the war, and the short occupation of the area by the German army in September 1939 cannot be compared to the 21 bloody months of Soviet rule (148). 83. WJ 1:131–32, 138. From this time on, according to the author, the evidence does not suggest that Jews were favored; rather, Soviet documents indicate that Soviets made efforts

202  notes to pages 21–26 to increase the number of Belarusians in these positions for propagandistic purposes (139–43). 84. WJ 1:146, 148, 153, 155. 85. See the Festschrift for Tomasz Strzembosz: Krzysztof Jasiewicz, ed., Europa nieprowincjonalna/Non-Provincial Europe: Przemiany na ziemiach wschodnich dawniej Rzeczypospolitej (Białoruś, Litwa, Łotwa, Ukraina, wschodnie pogranicze III Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej) w latach 1772–1999 (Warsaw: Instytut studiów politycznych PAN and Oficyjna wydawnictwa RYTM, 1999). Szarota’s contribution is titled “Problem kolaboracji w Wilnie pod okupacją sowiecką: Sprawa Teodora Bujnieckiego”; Gross’s is titled “Lato 1941 w Jedwabnem: Przyczynek do badań nad udziałem społeczności lokalnych w eksterminacji narodu żydowskiego w latach II wojny światowej.” 86. “Diabelskie szczegóły.” 87. Quoted in Gross, Wokół Sąsiadów, 12–13. 88. Quoted in ibid., 15. Orig. pub. as Jan Gross, “Mord ‘zrozumiały’?” Gazeta Wyborcza, 25–26 November 2000. 89. Reprinted in Gross, Wokół Sąsiadów, 18. 90. Ibid., 7. 91. Tomasz Szarota, “Czy na pewno już wszystko wiemy?” Gazeta Wyborcza, 2–3 December 2000. 92. Strzembosz, “Collaboration Passed Over in Silence,” in The Neighbors Respond, 224–25. Orig. pub. as “Przemilczana kolaboracja,” Rzeczpospolita, 27–28 January 2001. 93. Polonsky and Michlic, The Neighbors Respond, 227. 94. Ibid., 234. 95. “A Roundtable Discussion: Jedwabne—Crime and Memory,” in The Neighbors Respond, 261. The Rzeczpospolita discussion is also published in the original Polish under the title “Jedwabne, 10 lipca 1941—zbrodnia i pamięć,” in Gross, Wokół Sąsiadów, 49–68. I am citing here the translation published in The Neighbors Respond. 96. Polonsky and Michlic, The Neighbors Respond, 261. 97. Ibid., 261. 98. Ibid., 254–55. 99. Ibid., 255–56. 100. Gross, Wokół Sąsiadów, 77. Orig. pub. as “A jednak sąsiedzi,” Rzeczpospolita, 11 April 2001. 101. My thanks to Piotr Sommer for his help with the translation of these lines. 102. “Jedwabne without Stereotypes: Agnieszka Sabor and Marek Zając Talk with Professor Tomasz Szarota,” in The Neighbors Respond, 380. Orig. pub. in Tygodnik Powszechny, 28 April 2002. 103. In an interview included in The Neighbors Respond, Szarota comments that Neighbors, like Upiorna dekada, might have passed without any comment had the Polish journalist Andrzej Kaczyński not read Gross’s essay in Strzembosz’s Festschrift and felt so horrified that he went to Jedwabne to ask people if it was true. “Unfortunately,” Szarota writes, “he received confirmation” (The Neighbors Respond, 380–81). 104. Gross, Wokół Sąsiadów, 86–87. 105. In Wokół Sąsiadów, Gross includes an afterword (117–19) praising the IPN and the two thick volumes it produced for “providing us with a solid and generally accessible point of departure for the re-creation of a truthful history of the Nazi occupation in

notes to pages 26–29 203 Poland in relation to the most traumatic event of that period, the Holocaust of the Jews” (117). 106. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994). The book, originally published as a series of articles in The New Yorker, appeared first in 1963. 107. See WJ 1, esp. 19, 32–37. 108. On this topic, see Julia Brun-Zejmis, “The Origins of the Communist Movement in Poland and the Jewish Question, 1918–1923,” Nationalities Papers 22, supplement no. 1 (1994): 29–54; and Schatz, The Generation. 109. I owe this triadic formulation to conversations with Amir Weiner. 110. Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 4. 111. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993). 112. Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 239. 113. See Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Igal Halfin, “From Darkness to Light: Student Communist Autobiography during NEP,” Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 45, no. 2 (1997): 210–36; and Jochen Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi,” Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3 (1996): 344–73. 114. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 459.

Chapter 3. The Soviet Union, the Holocaust, and Auschwitz The author would like to express his appreciation to the editors and staff of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History for their help in improving the clarity and citations for the chapter. 1. The numbers vary depending on which borders are considered, how population movements are calculated, and whether one includes only victims killed on Soviet soil. See John Garrard, “The Nazi Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Interpreting the Newly Opened Archives,” East European Jewish Affairs 2, no. 2 (1986): 4–5. According to the 1939 census, 3,020,000 Jews lived within the prewar borders of the Soviet Union. These included 1,533,000 in Ukraine, 375,000 in Belorussia, and 200,000 in the parts of the RSFSR (including Crimea and the North Caucasus) that were conquered by Germany during the war, for a total of 2,100,000 in the areas later occupied by the Nazis. The Jewish population of the territory annexed by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 (including Lithuania except for the Vilnius area, Latvia, Estonia, western Belorussia, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina), combined with the 200,000 refugees who came from Nazi-occupied Poland, was around 2,150,000. As no more than 10–12 percent of the total Jewish population succeeded in fleeing the enemy (many failed to reach the unoccupied territories of the USSR, or went to areas soon overrun by the Germans), 1,750,000–1,800,000 Jews from the annexed territories found themselves under German control. Of all the Jews living in the preinvasion Soviet Union, those who were in the occupied areas and could not flee numbered 2,750,000–2,900,000. See Yitzhak Arad, “The Holocaust of Soviet Jewry in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union,” Yad Vashem Studies (1991): 7–9. There are also questions about the reliability of the official census data of 1939, the number who left or fled into the depths of the Soviet Union from the beginning of the German occupation, how many among them were Jews, and the precise number of Jews killed in flight by

204  notes to pages 29–30 the German air force and under fire by the advancing German army. See Yitzhak Arad, “Katastrofa sovetskogo evreistva,” in his Unichtozhenie evreev SSSR v gody nemetskoi okkupatsii (1941–1944): Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1992), 5. Arad concludes that of the 2.75–2,900,000 Jews who lived in the occupied territory, almost all died (ibid., 30). Other estimates for the number of Jews killed include Raul Hilberg’s figure of 700,000 in The Destruction of European Jewry (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985); Nora Levin suggests 1,500,000 in The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (1968; New York: Thomas Crowell, 1988). Zvi Gitelman estimates that as many as one-third of all Jews killed in the Holocaust were under Soviet rule in 1940; see “The Soviet Union,” in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, ed. David Wyman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 303. Ilya Altman cites the figure of 1,050,000 offered in Velikaia otechestvennaia voina, 1941–1945, vol. 4 (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1999). His own estimate is nearly 3,000,000, with a minimum of 2,800,000, very close to Arad’s. He breaks down the numbers as follows: Ukraine, 1,500,000; Belorussia, more than 800,000; Moldavia (northern Bukovina and Bessarabia), around 250,000; Lithuania, 220,000; Russia, more than 150,000; Latvia, 75,000; Estonia, around 2,000. See Ilya Altman and Claudio Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste, 1933–2001,” in Vassili [Vasilii] Petrenko, Avant et après Auschwitz, trans. François-Xavier Nérard (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 265. Eastern Poland, annexed by the Soviet Union between September and November 1939, was incorporated into the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Republics, while northeastern Romania, annexed between June and August 1940, became the new republic of Moldavia. 2. Mordecai Altshuler, “The Unique Features of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,” in Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Yaacov Ro’i (Portland, OR: Franklin Cass, 1995), 175. 3. The situation has changed since perestroika: Russian publications include such titles as Mikhail Iakovlevich Gefter, Ekho Kholokosta i russkii evreiskii vopros (Moscow: Nauchno-prosvetitel´nyi tsentr “Kholokost,” 1995); S. Brukhfeld [Stéphane Bruchfeld] and P. Levin [Paul A. Levine], Peredaite ob etom detiam Vashim: Istoriia Kholokosta v Evrope, 1933–1945 (Moscow: Tekst, 2000); Aleksandr Iosifovich Kruglov, Entsiklopediia Kholokosta (Kiev: Evreiskii sovet Ukrainy and Fond “Pamiat´ zhertv fashizma,” 2000); and Mariia M. Al´tman, Otritsanie Kholokosta: Istoriia i sovremennye tendentsii (Moscow: Rossiiskaia biblioteka Kholokosta, 2001), to name but a few. In Israel the Holocaust is not always referred to as Ha’Shoah (a biblical term meaning desolation) but also as Ha’churban (the destruction), used by medieval rabbis to describe the destruction of the Jewish Temple and the exile of the Jews. Also used in Israel is the term Ha’ hashmadah (the destruction or the annihilation). These terms allow the events of the Nazi genocide to be seen in the context of Jewish history and are, in part, a reaction to the Christian origins of the term Holocaust, a sacrificial offering. Until recently in Germany one spoke of Judenvernichtung, which comes close to being the equivalent of unichtozhenie. My thanks to Omer Bartov for this information. 4. Robert Conquest, “Stalin and the Jews,” New York Review of Books 43, no. 12 (11 July 1996): 48. For more on Stalin’s antisemitism, see Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), esp. 678–84; and Arno Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews: The Complete History of the State-Sponsored Terrorism of the Jews under Stalin (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), 188–89. All three men agree that Stalin was not a simple antisemite, and that his hostility to the Jews was not racially based.

notes to pages 30–35 205 5. Leonid Liuks contends that toward the end of his life, growing impatience and lack of confidence in his successors led Stalin to promote an ideological antisemitism that would have been deadly for the Jews had he not died before acting on his most murderous intentions. See his “Evreiskii vopros v politike Stalina,” Voprosy istorii, no. 7 (1999): 56. 6. Petrenko, Avant et après Auschwitz, 133. The Russian edition, published by the Russian Library of the Holocaust (Rossiiskaia biblioteka Kholokosta), is titled Do i posle Osventsima: Uznikam natsistkikh lagerei smerti i voinam-osvoboditeliam posviashchaetsa (Moscow: Fond Kholokosta, 2000), 133. Unlike the French edition, it does not contain the valuable essay by Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 217–81. My remarks are based on a reading of both editions; quotations are cited from the French edition, modified here and there by substituting the Russian word or phrase as needed. 7. Petrenko, Avant et après Auschwitz, 128. 8. Ibid., 170. 9. Ibid., 120. 10. Ibid., 121. 11. Ibid., 122. 12. Ibid., 124. 13. Ibid., 125–26. 14. Ibid., 129. 15. Shmuel Krakowski and Joseph Buszko, “Auschwitz,” in Israel Gutman, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 1:115; and Walter Laqueur, “Auschwitz,” in The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It?, ed. Michael I. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 188. In Auschwitz and the Allies (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981), Martin Gilbert says that the Allies did not know about the gas chambers until April–May 1944. William Rubenstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (New York: Routledge, 1998), makes the case that bombing Auschwitz would have been a bad idea; more controversially, he presents the Allies’ behavior in aiding the Jews as almost exemplary. 16. Neufeld and Berenbaum, The Bombing of Auschwitz, 1. 17. Tami Davis Biddle, “Allied Air Power: Objectives and Capabilities,” in ibid., 46. 18. Henry Feingold, “Bombing Auschwitz and the Politics of the Jewish Question during World War II,” in The Bombing of Auschwitz, 196–98. Michael Beschloss argues convincingly that until 1944 President Roosevelt did not command the agencies in charge of U.S. foreign policy to publicize what the government knew about the extermination of the Jews, and his own references to the subject were vague and infrequent. See Michael Beschloss, The Conquerers: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 38. Also, the New York Times and the U.S. press in general, while reporting about the developing Final Solution, generally placed these brief reports on the back pages with small headlines, which raised doubts about the accuracy of the reports. See Donald M. McKale, Hitler’s Shadow War: The Holocaust and World War II (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002), 393. 19. Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 10. That the Soviets could have bombed Auschwitz seems clear, as they had the requisite aircraft and the advance of the Soviet armies made bases available; see Von Hardesty, Red Phoenix: The Rise of Soviet Air Power, 1941–1945 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1982), appendix 8.

206  notes to pages 35–45 20. Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 275. 21. Arad, “Holocaust of Soviet Jewry,” 37. 22. Lukasz Hirzowitz, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, 1931–1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey Gurock (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 33. 23. Mordecai Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation at the Time of the Nazi Invasion: Policies and Realities,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 85–87, 89–90. 24. Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” (222 n. 1). 25. Ibid., 223–24. 26. Ibid., 229. 27. Richard Overy, Russia’s War (New York: Penguin, 1997), 137. 28. Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: East European Jewry under Soviet Rule, 1939–1941, trans. Naftali Greenwood (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 189–93. 29. Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 232–33. 30. Levin, Lesser of Two Evils, 32–33. 31. Ibid., 197. 32. Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 243. 33. Levin, Lesser of Two Evils, 61–62. 34. Liuks, “Evreiskii vopros,” 45. 35. Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 235–36. 36. Ibid., 240. 37. Ibid., 245. 38. Il´ia Al´tman, Ten´ Kholokosta: Materialy II Mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma “Uroki Kholokosta i sovremennaia Rossiia,” Moskva, 4–7 maia 1997 g. (Moscow: Fond Kholokosta, 1998), 265. 39. Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 248. 40. Ibid., 248. 41. Ibid., 250. 42. Ibid., 253–54. 43. Ibid., 257. 44. Ibid., 259. 45. Ibid., 260. 46. Ibid., 261. 47. Ibid., 262. 48. Ibid., 270. 49. Ibid., 273. 50. Arad, Unichtozhenie, 23. 51. Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 52. Harvey Asher, “The Black Book and the Holocaust,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 3 (1999): 401–16; the account that follows relies on this work, unless otherwise noted. There are five different Black Books. Two versions came out in 1946, one in English, the other in Romanian. Yad Vashem published a third version in 1980; most of that manuscript is contained in the Glad and Levine 1981 translation. Both of these books lack materials contained in the 1947 manuscript. Neizvestnaia chernaia kniga (which techni-

notes to pages 46–48 207 cally is not a Black Book) came out in 1993. It contains materials gathered by the Jewish Antifascist Committee that did not make it into the 1947 manuscript. Thanks to the efforts of Irina Ehrenburg, the complete 1947 manuscript was published in 1993 as Chernaia kniga. It was subsequently translated into German as Das Schwarzbuch and French as Le livre noir. In 2002, an English translation by David Patterson was published with the title The Complete Black Book of Soviet Jewry. For these editions, see World Jewish Congress et al., The Black Book: The Nazi Crimes against the Jewish People (New York: Stratford Press, 1946); Matatias Carp, Cartea Neagra: Suferintele evreilor din România, 1940–1944 (Bucharest: Atelierele grafice Socec, 1946); Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, eds., The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German Fascist Invaders throughout the Temporarily Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps, trans. John Glad and James Levine (New York: The Holocaust Library, 1981); Il´ia Erenburg and Vasilii Grossman, eds., Chernaia kniga: O zlodeiskom povsemestnom ubiistve evreev nemetsko-fashistskimi zakhvatchikami vo vremenno-okkupirovannykh raionakh Sovetskogo Soiuza i v lageriakh unichtozheniia Pol´shi vo vremia voiny 1941–45 (Vilnius: IAD, 1993); Yitzhak Arad and T. Pavlova, eds., Neizvestnaia chernaia kniga: Svidetel´stva ochevidtsev o katastrofe sovetskikh evreev, 1941–1943 (Jerusalem and Moscow: Yad Vashem and GARF, 1993); Ilja Ehrenburg and Wassili Grossman, eds., Das Schwarzbuch: Der Genozid an den sowjetischen Juden (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994); Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, eds., Le livre noir: Textes et témoignages (Paris: Actes Sud, 1995); and Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, eds., The Complete Black Book of Soviet Jewry, trans. and ed. David Patterson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). 53. Liuks, “Evreiskii vopros,” 43. 54. Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust, and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 98. 55. Quoted by Ilya Altman, “Toward the History of The Black Book,” Yad Vashem Studies 21 (1999): 247. 56. Quotation from World Jewish Congress et al., The Black Book, 5. 57. About 500,000 Jews saw service in the Red Army, a very high proportion relative to their percentage of the population. By June 1943, the Jews ranked third in the total number of military orders awarded. Statistics for 1944 from Krasnaia zvezda place the Jews fifth. See Gennadi Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Antisemitism in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Prometheus Books, 1995), 23. 58. Mordecai Altshuler, “Were There Two Black Books about the Holocaust?” Jews and Jewish Topics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 1, no. 17 (1991): 54. 59. See Ilya Altman, “Histoire et destinée du Livre noir,” in Le livre noir, 19–20. 60. Carp, Cartea Neagra. 61. Shimon Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish AntiFascist Committee in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), documents 131, 366. 62. Kostrychenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 69. 63. Redlich, War, Holocaust, and Stalinism, 104. 64. Yehoshua A. Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, 1939–1953 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 8. 65. Ehrenburg and Grossman, The Black Book, 221.

208  notes to pages 48–50 66. Reuben Ainsztein, “Soviet Jewry in the Second World War,” in The Jews in Russia since 1917, ed. Lionel Kochan, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 296. 67. Redlich, War, Holocaust, and Stalinism, 109–11. 68. Zvi Gitelman put the figure of Soviet war dead at 20,000,000 in “Soviet Reactions to the Holocaust,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 8. Other estimates run between 25,000,000 and 27,000,000; see John Garrard, “Russia and the Soviet Union,” in The Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Walter Laqueur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 590. 69. Ehrenburg and Grossman, The Black Book, 229, 366, 374–75. 70. Ibid., 85, 226. 71. Zvi Gitelman, “Politics and the Historiography of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,” in Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR, ed. Gitelman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 29. 72. See Ilya Altman, “Teaching the Holocaust in Russia in the 21st Century” (www1. yadvashem.org /download/education/conf/Altman.pdf, accessed 9 January 2013). 73. Ibid., 278. 74. See Nina Tumarkin, “Story of a War Memorial,” in World War II and the Soviet People: Select Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, ed. John and Carol Garrard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 126–46, for the controversy surrounding the location and representation of this memorial. 75. For an excellent, brief account of the contemporary Holocaust scene in Russia, see Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (New York: Viking, 2000), 316–18. 76. For why that was and how that changed, see the provocative book by Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), the first of many books to deal with the subject of how the Holocaust became transformed into “Shoah business.” Also helpful is Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler (New York: Routledge, 1999). 77. Merridale, Night of Stone, 317. Currently, there are approximately 600,000 Jews residing in the former Soviet Union, nearly 1,000,000 fewer than the 1,449,167 enumerated in the Soviet census of January 1989. See Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, expanded ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 217–18.

Chapter 4. Patterns of Violence: The Local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July–August 1941 Many of the documents cited here are microfilmed copies held in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). In accord with USHMM citation policy, references to these microfilmed documents give the original archive listing, then the USHMM registration group (RG) followed by the reel number. A list of archival abbreviations used throughout the chapter follows. Moldova: ANRM—Arhiva Naţională a Republicii Moldova; ASIS—Arhiva Serviciului de Informaţii şi Securitate. Romania: AMAE—Arhiva Ministerului Afacerilor Externe; ASRI—Arhiva Serviciului Român de Informaţii; DANIC—Direcţia Arhivelor Naţionale Istorice Centrale; DGP—Direcţie Generalē a Poliţiei; PCM-CM—Fond Preşedenţia Consiliului de Miniştri, Cabinetul Militar; V—judeţul Vâlcea. Russia: GARF—Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii; TsA

notes to pages 51–52 209 FSB—Tsentral´nyi arkhiv Federal´noi sluzhby bezopasnosti. Ukraine: GDA SBU— Galuzevyi derzhavnyi arhiv sluzhby bezpeki Ukrainy. This research was made possible by the generous funding of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the University of Central Florida. I owe a great deal to the staff of the USHMM Archives for helping me identify and work with their precious and unique collections; without their support this chapter would have never been written. The staff of the National Historical Archives in Bucharest was also most helpful in making available to me many documents, some of them not previously used by scholars. Many people read and helped me improve previous drafts of this text, among them Holly Case, Peter Black, Rosalind Beiler, Connie Lester, Spencer Downing, and Robert Cassanello. 1. Scholarly works that address this problem include Vincas Bartusevicius, Joachim Tauber, and Wolfram Wette, Holocaust in Litauen: Krieg, Judenmorde und Kollaboration im Jahre 1941 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003); Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004), 59–88; Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 212–19; Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Christoph Dieckmann, Kooperation und Verbrechen: Formen der “Kollaboration” im östlichen Europa, 1939–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003); David Gaunt, Paul A. Levine, and Laura Palosuo, Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 86–97; Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 154–62; Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 180–83; Knut Stang, Kollaboration und Massenmord: Die litauische Hilfspolizei, das Rollkommando Hamann und die Ermordung der litauischen Juden (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996); and Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 239–97. 2. See Gross, Neighbors, 7. 3. On the Holocaust as a phenomenon rooted in modernity, see esp. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), first published in 1989. Bauman effectively returns to the thesis first expounded by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951). See also James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). An informative discussion of the continuities and discontinuities between pre-Nazi antisemitic violence and the Holocaust can be found in Jonathan Frankel, ed., The Fate of the European Jews, 1939–1945: Continuity or Contingency? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 4. Gross, Neighbors, 122–25. 5. On the debate over Neighbors, see the discussion in Slavic Review 61, no. 3 (2002): 453–89; John Connelly, “Poles and Jews in the Second World War: The Revisions of Jan T. Gross,” Contemporary European History 11, no. 4 (2004): 641–58; Antony Polonsky

210  notes to pages 52–57 and Joanna B. Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 209–400; and Marci Shore’s chapter in this book. 6. Northern Bukovina was not a province but a part of the historical province of Bukovina. Northern Bukovina was annexed by the Soviets in late June 1940, simultaneous with the annexation of Bessarabia. This detail is ignored here for the sake of brevity. 7. German Einsatzgruppe D participated in killing operations in northern Bukovina and Bessarabia as well, but Germans did not create an administration here, and the last word in relations between local civilians and the military was that of the Romanians. On Einsatzgruppe D’s activity in northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, see Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzengruppe D in der südliche Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 112–254. 8. The Gagauzi are a small Turkish-speaking but Orthodox Christian people that arrived in southern Bessarabia, together with Bulgarians, from the Balkans, mostly in the first half of the 1800s, as refugees and settlers at the invitation of the Russian government. 9. Alexander V. Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflicts in East European Borderlands, 1870–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 126–48. 10. On the history and workings of the Extraordinary State Commission, see Marina Sorokina’s chapter in this book. 11. This collection is kept in USHMM, acc. no. 1029. In 1941–44, Cerninăuţi was the capital of the province of Bukovina; now Chernivtsy is the capital of the eponymous region in Ukraine. 12. The Romanians called this region Transnistria, meaning “the area across the Dniester River.” On Romanian atrocities in Transnistria, see Jean Ancel, Transnistria, 1941–1942: The Romanian Mass Murder Campaigns (Tel Aviv: Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, Tel Aviv University, 2003); and the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report (Iaşi: Polirom, 2005), 141–68. On the numbers of those deported, see AMAE problem 33, vol. 21, f. 144 (USHMM RG-25.012, reel 10). 13. Marcel-Dumitru Ciuca et al., eds., Stenogramele şedinţelor Consiliului de Miniştri: Guvernarea Ion Antonescu, 8 vols. (Bucharest: Arhivele Nationale ale Românie, 1997– 2004) (hereafter Stenogramele), 3:570–72. I have discussed the Romanian government’s motives for cleansing the provinces of Jews at some length. See Vladimir Solonari, “Model Province: Explaining the Holocaust of Bessarabian and Bukovinan Jewry,” Nationalities Papers 34, no. 3 (2006): 485–87. 14. DANIC PCM-CM dos. 397/1940, ff. 22–23, 30 (USHMM RG-25.012, reel 1). In June 1940, the Soviets also annexed a small piece of what traditionally was the Old Kingdom or Regat—that is, part of the Romanian State in 1859–1918—the district of Herţa in the province of Moldova. The number of Jews there, according to the same source, was 1,938 in 1930. It may have decreased somewhat by the early 1940s (ibid., f. 30). 15. Obviously, some Jews left those territories in the first days of the war, before their reoccupation by the Romanian troops, but how many left is exceedingly difficult to assess. ANRM contains files with the lists of “evacuees” from the Moldavian SSR (which comprised the bulk of Bessarabia) who fled from the joint Romanian-German invasion. (It is not clear when and by whom the lists were compiled.) The total number was about 12,000–13,000, the great majority of whom—about 80 percent—were Jews. (See ANRM fond 1026, inv. 1, dos. 11–12 [USHMM RG-54.002, reel 1].) But not all refugees registered

notes to pages 57–59 211 with the Soviet authorities, so their total number and the proportion of Jews among them are anyone’s guess. 16. For more on Romanian army and gendarmerie atrocities against Jews in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, see Jean Ancel, “The Romanian Way of Solving the ‘Jewish Problem’ in Bessarabia and Bukovina, June–July 1941,” Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988): 187–232; and the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report, 126–40. My interpretation of the topic differs substantially from Ancel’s. 17. This perception should not be accepted at face value. The reality was much more complex: not only Jews demonstrated their support for the Soviets; not all Jews did so; and the behavior of the locals, Jews included, though humiliating to the Romanians, was not murderous. According to the General Staff’s report of (perhaps late) July 1940, during the withdrawal the Romanian army lost five officers, of whom two committed suicide, two were shot dead by the Soviets, and one was shot dead by the (Romanian) gendarmerie “while running”—that is, most probably, deserting his post (Florica Dobre, Vasilica Manea, and Lenuţa Nicolescu, eds., Anul 1940: Armata română de la ultimatum la dictat. Documente, 1 [Bucharest: Editura Europa Nouă, 2000], doc. nos. 106, 265). These losses were substantially less than suggested in the initial, panicky reports and media coverage. Research on the fate of the alleged victims of Jewish violence corroborates these findings. See Mihail Pelin, Legenda şi adevăr (Bucharest: Edart, 1994). For a very useful collection of the army’s reports on the circumstances of the withdrawal from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in 1940, see Anul 1940, 1. I address this issue in more detail in “Model Province,” 485–87. 18. Matatias Carp, Cartea Neagră (1946; repr., Bucharest: Editura Diogene, 1996), 3:50; italics added. 19. TsA FSB d. 1083, ll. 283–85, 314 (USHMM RG-06.025, reel 6). 20. ASRI dos. 64472, vols. 1–2 (USHMM RG-25.004, reel 128). 21. Ibid., vol. 1, ff. 107, 114, 118, 142; vol. 2, ff. 4, 137, 154, 403. 22. Ibid., vol. 1, ff. 107, 159–60; vol. 2, ff. 137, 149–50, 154, 198–99, 215, 234. 23. ANRM fond 1026, inv. 2, dos. 13, f. 53 (USHMM RG-54.001, reel 14). 24. See the testimony of Gendarme General Constantin Tobescu, who worked under direct subordination to General Vasiliu in Bucharest: TsA FSB d. H–18767, pt. 2, ll. 279–312 (USHMM RG-06.025, reel 43). 25. ASRI dos. 20725, 9: 82, deposition of Gendarme Major Traian Drăgulescu, commander of Hotin Gendarme Legion, Bukovina province (USHMM RG-25.004M, reel 25). 26. For the former interpretation, see ibid., dos. 18424, vol. 2, f. 192 (reel 17); dos. 582, vol. 2, ff. 234–234 v., 257; for the latter, see ibid., dos. 40015, vol. 3, f. 266 v. (reel 65). Many witnesses testified that the term “cleansing of the terrain” (curăţirea terenului) was used by Vasiliu, Meculescu, and the latter’s subordinates while instructing the lower ranks, often with reference to “orders from above.” Whether the term was actually used or not, witnesses tended to agree that the meaning of the order was quite clear. See ibid., dos. 18424, vol. 2, ff. 182, 192 (reel 17); dos. 20521, vol. 2, f. 443, vol. 10, f. 249 (reel 23); dos. 20725, vol. 1, f. 13 (reel 24); dos. 40015, vol. 3, f. 266 v. (reel 65); dos. 18209, vol. 2, f. 485 v. (reel 78); dos. 582, vol. 2, ff. 234–34 v., 257 (reel 119); dos. 18621, vol. 1, ff. 4–5 (reel 120); and dos. 64472, vol. 1, ff. 20, 107, vol. 2, ff. 414–15 (reel 128). “Cleansing the terrain” was also used by Mihai Antonescu in a telegram of 12 July 1941 from Bucharest to Ion Antonescu’s “plenipotentiary representatives” (future governors) of Bessarabia and Bukovina, General

212  notes to pages 59–60 Constantin Voiculescu and Colonel Alexandru R. Rioşanu, “confirming the general principles of the regime in the provinces that had been laid down in Bucharest [on a prior occasion]: . . . to secure cleansing of the terrain from the Communists [and] the removal of Bolsheviks, unreliable elements, Jews-provocateurs, and Jews residing in the villages” (ibid., dos. 20725, vol. 7, ff. 5–12, esp. 9 [USHMM RG-25.004M, reel 25]; and dos. 40010, vol. 1, ff. 92 [reel 31]). 27. Ibid., dos. 18209, vol. 1, f. 485 v. (reel 78). 28. Ibid., 22539, vol. 12, ff. 228–30, 358–61, 391 (reel 16); dos. 22539, vol. 45, ff. 14, 57–58 (reel 17); dos. 20725, vol. 4, f. 247 ff., vol. 5, ff. 154, 243–44, 249, 256 v. (reel 24); dos. 18209, vol. 2, ff. 485–85 v. (reel 78). 29. In the 1946 trial, Meculescu was given 15 years of maximum-security imprisonment (temniţa grea) plus ten years of deprivation of civil rights, while Mânecuţa received five years of correctional imprisonment and five years of deprivation of civil rights (ibid., dos. 22539, vol. 12, ff. 456, 459 [reel 16]). Their divergent records, as I show below, fully justify this difference in punishment. 30. As Hotin County Gendarme Legion Chief Major Traian Drăgulescu testified, Mânecuţa required Drăgulescu to convey the order to his subordinates, the chiefs of gendarme sections, in July or early August 1941, while conspicuously remaining outside the meeting room. The gendarmes, who were well versed in interpreting the behavior of their bosses, could hardly fail to get the message. See ibid., dos. 20725, vol. 9, f. 82 (reel 25), and vol. 14, f. 1 (reel 26). 31. Ibid., vol. 9, f. 194 (reel 25). 32. See his surprisingly eloquent and informative ten-page deposition in ibid., dos. 20725, vol. 9, f. 82 (reel 25). Drăgulescu died in prison under investigation, but his wife posthumously was able to bring many Jewish witnesses from Hotin to testify to his help and support in 1941 (ibid., vol. 5, ff. 252–99; vol. 10, ff. 65, 67, 320 [reel 23]). 33. According to Soviet sources, in late July 1941, 540 people, mostly Jews, were shot at the village of Climăuţi by Romanian soldiers and Chief of Gendarme Post Ion Darângă. Smaller massacres organized by chiefs of gendarme posts took place at the township of Otaci (Ataki, Chief of Post Dumitrievici), the villages of Berlinţî and Medecăuţi, and nine other villages, the names of which were ascertained by the Romanian court in 1946. (On Climăuţi, Otaci, and Berlinţî, see Extraordinary State Commission, ANRM fond 1026, inv. 2, dos. 27, ff. 19–21 [USHMM RG-54.002M, reel 5]; on Medecăuţi, see Extraordinary State Commission, Chernivtsy region of Ukraine, GARF f. 7021, op. 79, Sokirianskii raion, ll. 103–103 ob. [USHMM RG-22.002, reel 4]. On the other villages, see GARF, ibid., l. 15; ASRI dos. 22539, vol. 12, f. 221 [USHMM RG-25.004, reel 16].) But in the township of Lipcani and in the villages of Teţcani and Trânca, the gendarmes rounded up the Jews and deported them to concentration camps but did not shoot them—in stark contrast to neighboring Bessarabia, where Jews from the rural areas hardly ever escaped death once they were caught by the gendarmes. (On Lipcani, see ASIS dos. 2084, esp. f. 17; on Teţcani, see ibid., dos. 5201, esp. ff. 127 v.–128; on Trânca, see ibid., dos. 2437, esp. f. 23 [USHMM RG-54.003M]. Copies of the files from this archive are on microfiches, organized by file number.) 34. In one such case, in the village of Lucovăţ de Sus, several people reportedly died from the gendarme’s beatings. See Extraordinary State Commission, Chernivtsy region of Ukraine, GARF f. 7021, op. 79 (Vyzhnitskii raion), ll. 14–16 (USHMM RG-22.002M, reel 15).

notes to pages 60–63 213 35. See ibid. for Gertsaevskii, Zastavnianskii, Kitsmanskii, Sadgorskii, and Chernovitskii raions (reels 14–15). 36. Henceforth members of the National Christian Party will, following convention, be referred to as “Cuzists.” “Cuzist” derives from A. C. Cuza (1857–1944), the leader from 1923 to 1935 of the League of National Christian Defense, which in 1935 fused with Octavian Goga’s National Agrarian Party to become the National Christian Party. It was one of the two main antisemitic parties of interwar Romania, the other being the Iron Guard, also known as the Legionaries. The National Christian Party was in power from December 1937 to February 1938 and attempted to implement its antisemitic program, only to provoke an economic crisis and see its fortunes plummet. For more on A. C. Cuza and his party, see Keith Hitchins, Rumania, 1866–1947 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 397, 423, 438, 402–4; Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 14–16, 200, 217, 247, 264–74, 278, 280; and the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report, 31–43. Specifically on this party’s rule, see Paul A. Shapiro, “Prelude to Dictatorship in Romania: Nationalist Christian Party in Power, December 1937–February 1938,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 8, no. 1 (1974): 45–88. 37. ASIS dos. 259 and dos. with the archival no. 4832 (not all files have numbers, and some can be identified by archival numbers only) (USHMM RG-54.003M). 38. Ibid., dos. with the archival no. 4832, f. 32 (USHMM RG-54.003M). 39. When one Ilarion Ghiţiu executed a teacher of Russian, a newcomer called Ivashko (judging by his name, a Slav and obviously a gentile), the villagers reportedly censured Ghiţiu: they respected Ivashko (ibid., f. 38 v.). 40. Ibid., f. 32 v. 41. See GDA SBU d. 2615 (USHMM RG-31.018M, reel 21); GDA SBU-CH opis´ 1121, sprava 93, Yad Vashem T-18 no. 9; GARF d. 125, ll. 4, 5, 40–42 ob. (USHHM RG-22.002M, reel 14); ASRI dos. 18621, vol. 2, ff. 36–44 v. (USHMM RG-25.004M); Marius Mircu, Ce s-a întâmoplat cu evreii în şi din România (Bat Yam: Editura GLOB, 1996), 2:71–76. 42. GDA SBU d. 2615, l. 180 (USHMM RG-31.018M, reel 21). I believe that the order came from L´viv in Galicia from the Ukrainian Committee, with which Ukrainian nationalists in Bukovina had close ties. Contemporary Ukrainian historians, while acknowledging that their underground organizations resurfaced in the last days of the Soviet withdrawal, deny their responsibility for the persecution of Jews. Instead, they claim that it was Romanians who arrested and killed Jews. One of those historians goes so far as to claim that Ukrainians were “upset” by the Romanian policy of the persecution of Jews: see Andrii Duda and Volodymyr Staryk, Bukovyns´kyi kuryn´ v boiakh za ukrains´ku derzhavnist´, 1918–1941–1944 (Chernivtsi: Ukrains´kyi narodnyi dim v Chernivtsakh, 1955), 61. 43. Mircu, Ce s-a întâmoplat, 2:75. Mircu even claims that the gendarmes attempted to free some of those detained, but the Ukrainians would not let them do it. 44. On Ghirovo as a center of cuzist agitation before World War II, see ASIS dos. with the archival no. 4832, f. 111 v. (USHMM RG-54.003M). In the December 1937 parliamentary elections, Cuzists received the largest share of the vote in Bessarabia (21.3 percent, as opposed to 9.15 percent in the country as a whole); the central and northern parts of the province were cuzist strongholds. See C. Enescu, “Semnificaţia alegerilor din decemvrie 1937 in evoluţia politica a neamului romanesc,” Sociologie românească, no. 11–12 (1937): esp. 522, 523, and fig. 5. 45. See GDA SBU d. 2615, l. 25 ob. (USHMM RG-31.018M, reel 21).

214  notes to pages 63–65 46. See, for example, Marius Mircu, Pogromurile din Bukovina şi din Dorohoi (1945), and Pogromurile din Basarabia şi din Transnistria (1947), repr. in Ce s-a întâmoplat, 2:49–120, 296–347. 47. For an informative discussion of the “pogrom paradigm,” see John D. Klier, “The Pogrom Paradigm in Russian History,” in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, ed. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 13–38. See also Hans Rogger, “Conclusions and Overview,” in ibid., 314–72. 48. The call for pogroms would immediately unleash a wave of violence against Jews all over the provinces. There was one possible exception, however. According to the testimony of one Shamis Khaim from the village of Vărtecăuţi (Vartikovtsy in Russian, Vartykivtsy in Ukrainian) in northern Bukovina, there was no pogrom there. When the Romanians arrived (it is not clear whether they were military or gendarmes), they arrested local Jews, 12 families in all, and escorted them to the margin of the village in order to shoot them. The local gentiles, however, having found out about the Romanians’ intentions, assembled and went to meet the would-be killers, fell to their knees, and begged them to release their victims. So the Jews were released, but then interned in camps and deported. Testimony kept in USHHM 1995, acc. no. 1029, box 1, item no. 196. 49. Sochireni, however, was part of the province (guberniia) of Bessarabia as it existed from 1812 to 1918 under the Russians and was usually referred to in this way from 1918 to 1940, under the Romanians, who did not have provinces as administrative units. After the Soviet takeover in 1940, Sochireni, together with the whole county of Hotin (Khotin in Russian and Ukrainian) to which it belonged, were chopped off from Bessarabia and included in the Chernivtsy region of Ukraine together with northern Bukovina (the criterion was that Ukrainians predominated in Hotin and surrounding villages) and the Herţa district. When the Romanians returned in 1940, they left Hotin county in the reconstituted province of Bukovina. Sochireni was thus a historically Bessarabian rather than a Bukovinian township, despite its administrative subordination. 50. GARF f. 7021 op. 79, d. 80 (USHMM RG-22.002M, reel 14). 51. Ibid., ll. 41–65. 52. This number—30 Jews killed during the pogrom—was suggested by four eyewitnesses (ibid., ff. 30, 59, 61, 62). Only one witness recalled 150 dead bodies (ibid., f. 43), another mentioned 15 (f. 46). 53. Sochireni was later the site of one of the most deadly concentration camps for Jews on their way to Transnistria, with ca. 4,000 Jews killed and diseased from hunger, mistreatment, and epidemics, possibly more. According to one eyewitness, of the 1,200 Jews from Sochireni before the war, in 1945 only 118 were still alive (ibid., f. 45). 54. GDA SBU d. 7833 (USHMM RG-31.018M, reel 21). 55. GARF f. 7021, op. 79 d., Kitsmanskyi raion, ll. 5, 46–50 (USHMM RG-22.002M, reel 14). 56. GDA SBU d. 7833, ll. 78, 10 (USHMM RG-31.018M, reel 21). 57. Estimates vary from 33 to 50; 40 is the number that figured in the act of indictment (ibid., f. 10). 58. Cf. especially the testimony of Klara Sherf, who said that almost the whole village escorted Jewish women and children to the local railway station, from which they were deported to Transnistria (ibid., f. 118). 59. Ibid., ff. 18–18 v., 93.

notes to pages 65–67 215 60. Mircu, Ce s-a întâmplat, 2:71–76, 78–79, 88–91; ASRI dos. 1241, vol. 1–2 (USHMM RG-25.004M, reel 15). 61. GARF f. 7021, op. 79, d. illegible (Vizhnitskii raion), ll. 2–3, 6a–7 ob., 8–9, 12 ob., 73–78 (USHMM RG-22.002M, reel 14). Local accounts in the village of Rostoki (Romanian Răstoace), however, blamed Romanian and German troops for the massacre of 60 Jews, a clear attempt to deflect attention from the activity of local murderers (ibid., ll. 109–12). On Kiselevo, see ibid. (Kitsmanskii raion), ll. 31–39 ob.; on Banilov-Russkii, see ibid., d. 125, ll. 57–61 (USHMM RG-22.002M, reel 14). 62. The only possible exception might have been the Jewish shtetl of Liublino, where a pogrom does seem to have taken place before the Romanians’ arrival, but it was probably aimed more at plunder than at murder (see ASIS dos. with the archival no. 5683, ff. 86–86 v. [USHMM RG-54.003M]). 63. Arkadii Zhukovs´kyi, Istoriia Bukovyny: Chastyna druga pislia 1774 r. (Chernivtsi: Chas, 1993), 182–84; Duda and Staryk, Bukovyns´kii kuryn´, 55–59. 64. John-Paul Himka, “The Basic Identity Formation in Ukraine: A Typology” (paper presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies Convention, Salt Lake City, November 2005), 10. I thank Professor Himka for permission to cite his paper. See also his “Ukrainian Collaboration in the Extermination of Jews during the Second World War: Sorting Out the Long-Term and Conjunctural Factors,” in The Fate of the European Jews, 170–89. On the strong antisemitic stream in the Ukrainian nationalist movement during World War II, see Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Its Attitude toward Germans and Jews: Iaroslav Stets´ko’s 1941 Zhyttiepys,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 23, nos. 3–4 (1999): 149–84. On the same topic, see also the very persuasive analysis in Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 142–53; Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War, 75–77, 157–58, 185–87; and Timothy Snyder, “The Causes of Ukrainian–Polish Ethnic Cleansing, 1943,” Past and Present 179 (May 2003): 203–8. 65. Zhukovs´kyi, Istoriia Bukovyny, 145–46; Duda and Staryk, Bukovyns´kii kuryn´, 55–57; Vasyl´ Veriga, “Bukovyn´skyi kuryn´, 1941–1944,” in Na zov Kyeva: Ukrains´kyi natsionalizm y II svitovii viiny: Zbirnik stattei, spogadiv i dokumentiv (New York: Novyi Shliakh, 1985), 109–10; Mariana Hausleitner, Die Rumänisierung der Bukowina: Die Durchsetzung des nationalstaatlichen Anspruchs Grossrumäniens 1918–1944 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001), 313–18. 66. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) RG-242M, T–175, roll 233, frames 721474–75, 721503, 721754–56 (11 and 13 July, 1 August 1941). See also Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord, 155–59; and Andrej Angrick, “Im Wechspiel der Kräfte: Impressionen zur deutschen Einflussnahme bei der Volkstumspolitik in Czernowitz vor ‘Barbarossa’ und nach Beginn des Überfalls auf die Sowjetunion,” in NS-Gewaltherrschaft: Beiträge zur historischen Forschung und juristischen Aufarbeitung, ed. Alfred Gottwald, Norbert Kampe, and Peter Klein (Berlin: Edition Heintrich, 2005), 318–55, esp. 337–43. 67. Viorica Nicolenco, Extrema dreapta în Basarabia (1923–1940) (Chişinău: Civitas, 1999). 68. Ion Antonescu’s view of former Cuzists was also consistently positive, in stark contrast to his hostility toward the Iron Guard. Cf. his saying in 1941 or in 1942: “Romania fulfills today the dreams and the ideals of A. C. Cuza . . . setting out to solve the Jewish

216  notes to pages 67–70 Question [according to] the Nazi program” (Blood Bath in Rumania [New York: The Record, 1942], 232–33, quoting the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report, 43). Cf. also his positive assessment of that party and the request that its former members be “utilized” under his regime in Stenogramele, 1:193, session of the Council of Ministers of 10 October 1940. 69. I have never encountered references to anything like this outside Ghirovo. 70. See ASIS dos. 9, f. 30 v.; 3733, f. 32; dos. 469, ff. 11–11 v.; 4741, f. 103 (USHMM RG-54.003M). 71. See, e.g., ibid., dos. 31647, ff. 19–19 v.; dos. 4023, ff. 18, 31 v.–32, 38, 61 v.–62, 65–66; dos. 3733, f. 32 v.; dos. 9, f. 30 v.; dos. 3320, ff. 19–19 v. 72. Valerii Ivanovich Pasat, Trudnye stranitsy istorii Moldovy, 1940–1950-e gg. (Moscow: Terra, 1994), 26, 161, 164–65. 73. See the list of categories of deportees in the internal memorandum of People’s Commissar of State Security [NKGB] of the Moldavian SSR Nikolai Stepanovich Sazykin to the People’s Commissar of the State Security of the USSR Vsevolod Nikolaevich Merkulov, 19 June 1941 (ibid., 166–67). The Moldavian SSR included the bulk of Bessarabia and a tiny part of the pre-1940 Ukrainian SSR along the left bank of the Dniester. South Bessarabia was included in the Ukrainian SSR (Izmail´skaia oblast, after 1954—part of Odessa oblast). Northern Bessarabia, together with northern Bukovina, formed Chernovitskaia oblast within the Ukrainian SSR. No comparable document is available on deportations in the latter regions, but it is safe to assume that the situation there was quite similar to that in the Moldavian SSR. 74. The documents are published in Ioan Scurtu and Constantin Hlihor, Anul 1940: Drama românilor dintre Prut şi Nistru (Bucharest: Editura academiei de înalte studii militare, 1992), 182–83. 75. See Veaceslav Stavilă, De la Basarabia Românească la Basarabia sovietică, 1939–1945 (Chişinău: Tipografia Centrală, 2000), 45. According to Stavilă’s data, through January 1941 the Soviets resettled 1,275 families from urban centers and the localities along the Romanian borders. Kubei’s current name is Cervonoarmeis´ke, in the Odessa region of Ukraine. 76. Only on 31 May 1941 did Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria send a secular letter to the heads of directories in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs informing them of two impending deportations of “members of families whose heads were repressed as participants in counterrevolutionary organizations or are in hiding” (Pasat, Trudnye stranitsy istorii Moldovy, 146). 77. ASRI dos. 64472, vol. 2, f. 235 (USHMM RG-25.0004, reel 128). 78. Extraordinary State Commission, ANRM fond 1026, inv. 1, dos. 22, f. 276 (USHMM RG-54.002M, reel 4). 79. ASIS dos. 615, f. 73 v. (USHMM RG-54.003M). 80. On Jewish left-wing, pro-communist sympathies in interwar Eastern Europe, see Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). On the Jewish role in the communist underground in Romania, see Vladimir Tismăneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 75–78. On the Bessarabian communist underground, see Mikhail Bruchis, Nations—Nationalities—People: A Study of the Nationalities Policy of the Communist Party in Soviet Moldavia (Boulder, CO: East

notes to pages 70–72 217 European Monographs, 1984), 140–84. On the eve of the Soviet ultimatum concerning Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, the Soviets created so-called “committees for the protection of the provinces (Ţinut),” whose task it was to impede the orderly retreat of the Romanian military and civil authorities and facilitate Soviet takeover. According to the data of the Siguranţa, the Romanian secret police, they were almost 100 percent Jewish in composition. See ANRM fond 666, inv. 2, dos. 148, 149 (USHMM RG-54.002M, reel 17). 81. Bruchis, Nations—Nationalities—People, 184–97. See also Stavilă, De la Basarabia românească, 40–44. 82. See Hausleitner, Die Rumänisierung der Bukowina, 354–56. 83. On Bessarabia, see Stavilă, De la Basarabia românească, 43; on northern Bukovina, see Zhukovs´kyi, Istoriia Bukovyny, 2:177–78. 84. Stavilă, for example, claims that this Soviet sensitivity was the reason why the Bessarabian communist organization was not recognized by the Soviets (De la Basarabia românească, 41). 85. There were exceptions, but very few. One of them was in the village of Mihalcovo in northern Bukovina (before 1940, northern Bessarabia). Here one Jew who served under the Soviets as a director of the village club and who refused to flee with the Red Army was executed, whereas other Jews in that village, including his sister, were deported to Transnistria but not shot. See Extraordinary State Commission, GARF f. 7021, op. 79, Sokirianskii raion, ll. 147–47 ob. (USHMM RG-22.002M, reel 14). In the village of Bej-Ghioz in southern Bessarabia, one Jewish family (five persons) was hung while the general pattern, both in that district (raion) and in the whole province, was to shoot Jews (ibid.; ANRM fond 1026, inv. 1, dos. 20, esp. f. 36 [USHMM RG-54.002M, reel 3]). In both cases especially severe treatment of these victims was probably caused by a perception of their being more guilty than other Jews. 86. In one truly exceptional case, in the village of Kotelevo in northern Bukovina (before 1940, northern Bessarabia), seven Soviet activists were arrested in July 1941 and sent to the military tribunal in the city of Chernivtsy, which released them—obviously having found them not guilty. These seven persons returned to their families in August the same year and were rearrested by the chief of the gendarme post there, with assistance from a group of locals. The locals escorted their victims to the bank of the Dniester River and shot them there. They even prevented their victims’ relatives from exhuming and interring their corpses in the local cemetery. The relatives complained to the county prefecture in the town of Hotin and received written permission for the reburial, but when they returned to the village, they found out that the corpses had already disappeared from their graves. See Extraordinary State Commission, GARF f. 7021, op. 79, Novoselitskii raion, ll. 39–42 ob. (USHMM RG-22.002M, reel 14). 87. ASIS dos. with the archival no. 1336, f. 87 (USHMM RG-54.003M). 88. Ibid., dos. 017383, ff. 28–28 v. 89. ASRI dos. 22539, vol. 12, f. 221 (USHMM RG-25.004M, reel 16). This is a bill of indictment of Voiculescu and others; the prosecutor quotes Gherman’s deposition, which I was not able to locate. 90. Drăgulescu’s desposition, ibid., dos. 20725, vol. 9, f. 82 (reel 25). 91. Ibid. 92. See Extraordinary State Commission, documents on Atakskii, Brichanskii, Lipkanskii, and Edinetskii raions of the Moldavian SSR (ANRM fond 1026, inv. 1, dos. 15, 16, 27,

218  notes to pages 72–76 324 [USHMM RG-54.002M, reels 3, 5, 112]) and Hotinskii, Sokirianskii, and Kelmenetskii raions of the Ukrainian SSR (GARF f. 7021, op. 79, d. 80—Sokirianskii raion, two other delo nos. are illegible [USHMM RG-22.002M, reel 14]). 93. ASRI dos. 22539, vol. 12, f. 221 (USHMM RG-25.004 reel 16); ibid., dos. 18621, vol. 1, ff. 41–41 v. (reel 120). See also further evidence of the same in ibid., dos. 18621, vols. 1 and 2 (reel 121). 94. DANIC MAE IGJ dos.27/1941, ff. 19–21; ibid., 79/141dos. ff. 100–14 (USHMM RG-25.003M, reel 30). 95. On the activities of Ukrainian nationalists during the same period see, in particular, Manecuţa’s information reports in ibid., ff. 64–74. 96. DANIC DGP dos. 236/1941. 97. See Guvernământul Basarabiei, Basarabia resrobită: Drepturi istorice, nelegiuiri bolşevice, infăptuiri româneşti ([s.l.]: Institutul de arte plastice “Marvan,” 1942). 98. DANIC PCM-CM dos. 375/1943, f. 351 (USHMM RG-25.013M, reel 34). 99. Stenogramele, 6:538. He added in his own justification: “There were people who were put [in a position of power] against their will but had Romanian sentiments.” 100. Ibid., 5:449–50 (16 December 1941). 101. See Extraordinary State Commission, ANRM fond 1026, inv. 1, dos. 25, ff. 4–5 (USHMM RG-54.002M, reel 5); and ASIS dos. 570, 29 v., 64–64 v., 67–67 v. (USHMM RG-54.003M). 102. ASIS dos. 2780, 28 v. (USHMM RG-54.003M) (the village of Frasino, central Bessarabia). This episode refers to the execution of Jews who could not move during their deportation to Transnistria in October 1941. On the execution of Jews during that deportation, see the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report, 144–46. 103. ASIS dos. 3733, ff. 32, 36 (USHMM RG-54.003M). 104. In the village of Onişcani in central Bessarabia, Vasile Crăciun was appointed mayor by a Romanian officer because he was better dressed than other peasants (ibid., dos. with the archival no. 1336, f. 17). In the village of Trinca in northern Bukovina (before 1940, Bessarabia), Orac was appointed by a Romanian officer because he was the only former mayor in the group of peasants who assembled to welcome the Romanian troops (ibid., dos. 2837, f. 61). In the village of Rotunda in northern Bessarabia, Kalistrat Razlog (Calistrat Răzlog), who under the Soviets was chairman of the village soviet, became mayor under the Romanians because he was the first to capture a transport with rifles which the Soviets abandoned while retreating, to distribute the arms among the locals, and to organize a warm welcome for the Romanian army (ibid., dos. 6357, ff. 63, 67 v., dos. 735/938, f. 22). 105. Mayors were elected in interwar Romania, whereas in 1939–44 they were appointed. 106. It was Ion Antonescu’s idea to use the abundant labor of residents in the provinces to obtain various improvements in the provincial infrastructure with the view of transforming them into “models” for the rest of the country. See especially Stenogramele, 4:557 (5 September 1941); 5:6, 470 (6 October and 16 December 1941). 107. See detailed descriptions of gardists’ functions and the compensations they received in the village in ASIS dos. 3733, ff. 15 v., 18–18 v., 41, 66 (USHMM RG-54.003M). In July 1941, gardists received rifles from the Soviet trophy stocks that later were confiscated from them (see DANIC-V dos. 53.1941/42, f. 21 [USHMM RG-25.019M, reel 31]).

notes to pages 76–83 219 108. ASIS dos. with the archival no. 4832, ff. 62, 72 (USHMM RG-54.003M). 109. Ibid., dos. 1846, ff. 64 v., 75 v. 110. See, e.g., the testimony of Vasile Podolean’s former wife and daughter. Podolean killed many Jews in the villages of Ineşti and Verejeni in northern Bessarabia and was allowed to take their clothes as compensation. His former wife and daughter were the first to denounce him for this to the Soviet investigators (ibid., dos. 4023, ff. 31 v.–32, 61 v.–62). In the village of Skaiany (Scăieni) in northern Bessarabia, Efim Stratu volunteered to kill Jews who in October 1941 were being escorted in columns to Transnistria (at that time old, weak, and ill Jews were routinely shot en route), for which he received the usual payment: clothing, a pillow, and other items. Stratu was a Cuzist between the wars, a Soviet informer in 1940–41 (villagers believed he contributed to the deportations of some of their kin), and under the Romanians he used to carouse regularly with the gendarmes. He was universally despised and hated (ibid., dos. 17069, ff. 12, 28, 29 v., 34 v., 65). 111. ASIS dos. 1348, esp. ff. 37–38, 50 v.–60 v., 62–87 (USHMM RG-54.003M). 112. On exhumation, see ibid., ff. 167–68. Besides, by the end of the investigation, Sergeenko seemed to have sensed the investigators’ problems and attempted to mislead them as to the location of the graves (ff. 86–87). 113. Ibid., ff. 211–50. 114. Ibid., f. 75 v. 115. Ibid., f. 117 v. 116. Ibid., ff. 44–46 v. 117. In total, about 93,500 persons were “repatriated” from Bessarabia, and 42,400 from northern Bukovina. See Dorel Bancoş, Social şi naţional în politica guvernului Antonescu (Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 2000), 108–10. Further references can be found in these pages. Important Soviet documents on the “repatriation” of Germans from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were published in Pasat, Trudnye stranitsy istorii Moldovy, 65–138. 118. ASIS dos. 1256, esp. ff. 49–56; dos. 1252 (USHMM RG-54.003M). 119. Ibid., dos. 1256, ff. 50, 56. 120. Ibid., f. 56.

Chapter 5. “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population”: The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–45 Substantially different versions of this chapter were presented at conferences: “The Destruction of European Jewry: Structures, Motivations, Opportunities,” at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam (December 2003); “Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity, and Violence in the Shatter Zone of Empires since 1848,” at the Herder Institut in Marburg (May 2007); and the Thirty-Ninth Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in New Orleans (November 2007). I thank those who gave comments there, particularly Nanci Adler, Hans Blom, Omer Bartov, Eric Weitz, Peter Holquist, Vladimir Solonari, and Holly Case. Thanks also to the anonymous readers approached by Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. This research was made possible by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), grant no. 355-52-003. 1. Joshua Rubenstein, “The War and the Final Solution on the Russian Front,” in The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories, ed. Rubenstein and Ilya Altman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 19.

220  notes to pages 83–85 2. As noted in Yitshak Arad, “Stalin and the Soviet Leadership: Responses to the Holocaust,” in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, vol. 1: History, ed. John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 356, 369. 3. Pavel Polian, “Stalin und die Opfer des nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungskriegs,” in Stalin und die Deutschen: Neue Beiträge der Forschung, ed. Jürgen Zarusky (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006), 91. 4. On Stalin’s antipathy to Jews, see Erik van Ree, “Heroes and Merchants: Stalin’s Understanding of National Character,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 1 (2007): 45. 5. Solomon M. Schwarz, The Jews in the Soviet Union (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1951), 334–42. Fifteen years later, he again spoke of a “silence about the Hitlerite policy of extermination of Jews.” In his view, the “Soviet press during the first months of the war simply reported almost nothing about what was happening to the Jews on the other side of the front.” See S. Shvarts, Evrei v Sovetskom Soiuze: S nachala Vtoroi mirovoi voiny (1939–1965) (New York: Izdatel´stvo Amerikanskogo evreiskogo rabochego komiteta, 1966), 136–52. 6. G. V. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast´ i antisemitizm (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2003), 226–27, 229–30. 7. Polian, “Stalin und die Opfer des nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungskriegs,” 90; Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army, 1939–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 255. 8. Shimon Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–1948 (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1982); Zvi Gitelman, “Soviet Reactions to the Holocaust, 1945–1991,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey Gurock (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 3–27. Gitelman deals with the Soviet treatment of the Holocaust after 1945 and finds that there was no distinct policy. 9. Jehoshua A. Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, 1939–1953 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 7–8. 10. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution” (1980; repr., New York: Holt, 1998), 71, 202–3. See also Laqueur, “Final Solution: Public Knowledge,” in The Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Laqueur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 203. 11. Arno Lustiger, Rotbuch: Stalin und die Juden. Die tragische Geschichte des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees und der sowjetischen Juden (Berlin: Aufbau, 1998), 120–21. 12. Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 164, 173. 13. Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Press,” in “Zerstörer des Schweigens”: Formen künstlerischer Erinnerung an die nationalsozialistische Rasse- und Vernichtungskrieg in Osteuropa, ed. Frank Grüner et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 33. Znamia, nos. 1–2 (1944): 185–99, carried Ilya Ehrenburg’s “Narodoubiitsy.” The journal also carried Vasilii Grossman’s “Treblinskii ad,” in which Grossman wrote: “Confident that he could act with impunity, Hitler took the decision to exterminate millions of innocent people during the summer of 1942.” Those killed were “mainly Jews, and to a lesser extent Poles and Gypsies” (Znamia, no. 11–12 [1944]: 121–44). For translations, see “The Treblinka Hell,” in Vasilii Grossman, The Years of War (1941–1945) (Moscow: Foreign

notes to pages 86–87 221 Languages Publishing House, 1946), 371–408 (quotations 376–77); and “Treblinka,” in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, ed. Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, trans. and ed. David Patterson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 462–83. A translation of most of the initial manuscript is in Grossman, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945, ed. and trans. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (London: Harvill, 2005), 281–306. The first full translation of the manuscript is “The Hell of Treblinka,” in Grossman, The Road: Short Fiction and Articles, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Olga Mukovnikova (London: MacLehose Press, 2010), 126–79. 14. Mordechai Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation of Soviet Jews at the Time of the Nazi Invasion,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 89; Lukasz Hirszowicz, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 31; Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 209. Altshuler cites the following newspapers: Der Shtern (Kiev), 7 July 1941; Krasnaia zvezda, 29 June 1941; and Pravda, 26 June, 27 June, and 25 August 1941. Hirszowicz mentions for the war only Molotov’s diplomatic note of January 1942. Weiner mentions Sovetskaia Ukraina, 12 October 1941, which carried Oleksandr Korniichuk’s play Partizany v stepiakh Ukrainy (Partisans in the Steppes of Ukraine). Too late to allow for discussion here, I noticed a study by Altshuler that mentions and supports my interpretation: Mordechai Altshuler, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mass Media during the War and in the First Postwar Years Re-Examined,” trans. Naftali Greenwood, Yad Vashem Studies 39, no. 2 (2011): 121–68. 15. Lev Bezymenskii, “Informatsiia po-sovetski,” Znamia, no. 5 (1998): 196; Ilya Altman and Claudio Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste (1933–2001),” in Vassili Petrenko, Avant et après Auschwitz, trans. François-Xavier Nérard (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 250, 259–60; Il´ja Al´tman, “Die Wiederspiegelung der nationalsozialistischen Politik der Judenvernichtung in der sowjetischen Literatur und Politik (1940–1980),” in “Zerstörer des Schweigens,” 17–19; Rubenstein, “The War and the Final Solution on the Russian Front,” 21; Corinne Ducey, “The Representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet Press, 1941–1945,” Slavonica 14, no. 2 (2008): 136. 16. Yitshak [Yitzhak] Arad, “The Holocaust as Reflected in the Soviet Russian Language Newspapers in the Years 1941–1945,” in Why Didn’t the Press Shout? American and International Journalism during the Holocaust: A Collection of Papers Originally Presented at an International Conference Sponsored by the Elia and Diana Zborowski Professorial Chair in Interdisciplinary Holocaust Studies, Yeshiva University, October 1995, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (Hoboken, NJ: Yeshiva University Press in association with KTAV Publishing House, 2003), 203–4, 211–12. See also Arad, “Stalin and the Soviet Leadership,” 355–70. The findings from Arad’s 2003 article are entirely absent from Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2009). 17. Niels Bo Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on War Crimes: An Analysis of the Commission’s Investigative Work in War and Post-War Stalinist Society” (Ph.D. diss., Copenhagen University, 2004), 38. Centralization of information about Nazi war crimes began much later: on 25 February 1942, the NKVD ordered all relevant documents, regardless of their provenance, sent to its Bureau of State Records. See Marina Sorokina’s chapter in the present book. 18. Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission,” 45–47. 19. Il´ia Al´tman, Zhertvy nenavisti: Kholokost v SSSR 1941–1945 gg. (Moscow: Fond

222  notes to pages 87–91 “Kovcheg,” 2002), 386, quoted in Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission,” 44–45. Compare Arad, “Stalin and the Soviet Leadership,” 359, who argues that Stalin and the Soviet leadership had “reliable information about the total annihilation of the Jews” in the occupied Soviet territories “by late 1941.” 20. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi sotsial´no-politicheskii arkhiv (RGASPI) f. 17, op. 125 (Department of Agitation and Propaganda), d. 52,1. 30: Fitin, head of the First [Intelligence] Upravlenie NKVD SSSR to Shcherbakov, “O polozhenii v raionakh, okkupirovannykh protivnikom: Po sostoianiiu na 20-oe avgusta 1941 goda,” Moscow, 26 August 1941. A shorter quotation from the document is in Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission,” 45. 21. “Obzor meropriiatiii germanskikh vlastei na vremenno okkupirovannoi territorii, podgotovlennyi na osnove trofeinykh dokumentov, inostrannoi pechati i agenturnykh materialov, postupivshikh s iiunia 1941 g. po mart 1943 g.,” Moscow, 1943, published in Neizvestnaia Rossiia: XX vek, ed. V. A. Kozlov (Moscow: Istoricheskoe nasledie, 1993), 4:273–75. 22. Pravda, 25 August 1941; Izvestiia, 26 August 1941. 23. See “Brat´ia evrei vsego mira!” Izvestiia, 26 August 1941, 3. On the meeting, see Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia, 3, 40–41, 193–94 n. 5. 24. “Vtoroi miting predstavitelei evreiskogo naroda,” Izvestiia, 26 May 1942, 3; Pravda, 26 May 1942, 3. Another English translation of Pravda’s rendition of the appeal “To the Jews of the Entire World!” is in War, Holocaust, and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR, ed. Shimon Redlich (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 202–3. On the meeting, see Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia, 42–43. 25. Trud, 24 February 1943, 2. This letter is not mentioned in Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia, or in Redlich, War, Holocaust, and Stalinism. 26. Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia, 51–52, 196 nn. 32–36. Translated excerpts from speeches here by Mikhoels, Fefer, Rabbi Shlifer, and Ehrenburg are in Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, 216–19. 27. “Plenum Evreiskogo antifashistskogo komiteta v SSSR,” Izvestiia, 12 April 1944, 2, and Trud, 12 April, 1944, 3; Lustiger, Rotbuch, 145; Dov-Ber Kerler, “The Soviet Yiddish Press: Eynikayt during the War, 1942–1945,” in Why Didn’t the Press Shout, 243. 28. TASS, “Miting predstavitelei evreiskogo naroda,” Pravda, 5 April 1944, 2. 29. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 225; Il´ia Erenburg, “Vystoiat´!” repr. from Krasnaia zvezda in Erenburg, Voina (iiun´ 1941–aprel´ 1942) (Moscow: OGIZ, Gosizdat khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1942), 306–9. 30. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin, 173, referring to Krasnaia zvezda, 17 December 1943. 31. Il´ia Erenburg, “Evrei,” Krasnaia zvezda, 1 November 1942, 3, repr. in Erenburg, Voina (aprel´ 1942–mart 1943) (Moscow: OGIZ, Gosizdat khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1943), 224–26. 32. Il´ia Erenburg, “Konets Vil´gelma Kube,” 24 September 1943; Erenburg, “Zemlia Piriatina,” Krasnaia zvezda, 26 November 1943, 3; both repr. in Erenburg, Voina (aprel´ 1943–mart 1944) (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1944), 117–18, 166–69. 33. TASS, “Miting,” 2. 34. Il´ia Erenburg, “Nakanune,” Pravda, 7 August 1944, 3. 35. Il´ia Erenburg, “Pomnit´!” Pravda, 17 December 1944, 3; Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled

notes to pages 91–94 223 Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (London: Basic Books, 1996), 220; Al´tman, “Die Wiederspiegelung der nationalsozialistischen Politik,” 23. 36. I. Stalin, O Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine Sovetskogo Soiuza, 4th ed. (Moscow: OGIZ, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1944), 11. 37. “Ot Sovetskogo Informbiuro: Vechernee soobshchenie 16 avgusta,” Pravda, 17 August 1941, 1; “Ot Sovetskogo Informbiuro: Vechernee soobshchenie 30 avgusta,” Pravda, 31 August 1941, 1. 38. I. Osipov, special correspondent, “Chudovishchnye zlodeianiia fashistov,” Izvestiia, 20 August 1941, 3. 39. “Ot Sovetskogo Informbiuro: Utrennee soobshchenie 9 avgusta,” Pravda, 10 August 1941, 2. 40. TASS, “V osvobozhdennoi El´ne,” Trud, 11 September 1941, 2 (quotation); E. Vorob´ev, “Gorod vozvrashchaetsia k zhizni,” Trud, 5 October 1941; “My vyrvalis´ iz ada: Rasskazy zhitelei El´ni,” Izvestiia, 12 September 1941, 3. 41. N. Petrov, “Nenavist´ naroda,” Izvestiia, 27 September 1941, 3. The revelation of the identity, made in passing, is at RGASPI f. 558 (Personal Papers of I. V. Stalin), op. 11, d. 204,1. 63. The postwar article is V. V. Mastikova, “Publitsistika M. I. Kalinina,” in Partiino-sovetskaia pechat´ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Sbornik statei), ed. S. I. Zhukov and A. L. Mishuris (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1964), 10, 12. See also N. Petrov, “Sviashchennaia nenavist´,” Izvestiia, 13 August 1941, 2; Mastikova, “Publitsistika,” 15–16, 18. 42. Pravda, 23 September 1941, 1. The differences from the original Russian translation were pointed out in RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 47,11. 54–57: M. Burtsev, nachal´nik UP Otdela GlavPURKKA, polkovyi komissar. D. Manuilskii forwarded the document to Shcherbakov on 27 September 1941, commenting that he had verified it all. This and another case of editing by the Sovinformbiuro were most likely the ones to which Ehrenburg referred in a letter, probably from October 1941, to Shcherbakov, Lozovskii, and Aleksandrov: RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 35,1. 89. He writes here also that he had earlier published one of the original fragments in Krasnaia zvezda. Despite internal awareness, the falsification reappeared in print; see Viktor Fink, “Blizitsia chas rasplaty,” Trud, 20 January 1942, 2, which calls the German the “soldier Emil Glotz” and misquotes the Sovinformbiuro text for 28 June 1941. 43. Stalin, O Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine Sovetskogo Soiuza, 26. 44. G. Grigor´ev, “Gitlerovskaia Germaniia—kopiia tsarizma,” Trud, 31 December 1941, 2. 45. “Vestnik inostrannoi sluzhebnoi informatsii TASS,” 13 December 1941, 48 (RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 208,1. 67); “Rumynskie zverstva v Odesse,” Pravda, 16 November 1941. 46. “Zverstva nemtsev v Kieve,” Pravda, 19 November 1941, 4, and Izvestiia, 19 November 1941, 4; see also Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 251; and Maior P. Stepanenko, “Chto proiskhodit v Kieve (Ot spetsial´nogo korrespondenta ‘Krasnoi zvezdy’),” Pravda, 29 November 1941, 3. 47. Ia. Makarenko, “V Lozovoi,” Pravda, 4 February 1942, 2. 48. Translations are in Soviet Government Statements on Nazi Atrocities (London: Hutchinson, [1946]), 7–10, 62–77. 49. “Nota Narodnogo komissara inostrannykh del tov. V. M. Molotova: O povsemestnykh grabezhakh, razorenii naseleniia i chudovishchnykh zverstvakh germanskikh vlastei na zakhvachennykh imi sovetskikh territoriiakh,” Pravda, 7 January 1942; Soviet Government Statements, 22–23.

224  notes to pages 94–96 50. V. K. Vinogradov et al., eds., Lubianka v dni bitvy za Moskvu: Po rassekrechennym dokumentam FSB RF (Moscow: Zvonnitsa, 2002), 367–70. For the German original, see Trial of the Major War Criminals (Nuremberg, 1949), 35: 84–86; for a facsimile, Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941–1944. Ausstellungskatalog (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), 89. 51. Sovinformbiuro, “Chudovishchnyi prikaz gitlerovskogo generala ob unichtozhenii vsekh istoricheskikh i khudozhestvennykh tsennostei i ob istreblenii muzhskogo naseleniia v zakhvachennykh nemtsami sovetskikh raionakh,” Pravda, 15 January 1942, 2; editorial “Chudovishchnyi prikaz gitlerovskogo komandovaniia,” Pravda, 15 January 1942, 1. The Russian republication of the document in Niurnbergskii protsess (Moscow, 1958), 3:345–46, is also incomplete. 52. “Vestnik inostrannoi sluzhebnoi informatsii TASS,” 17 January 1942 (RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 208,1. 70); Izvestiia, 18 January 1942. 53. Molotov’s note of April 1942 (discussed below) did not do either. 54. The report was signed by Magill, but Izvestiia and Molotov called him “von Magill.” See L. Dubrovitskii, “Bukhgalteriia palachei,” Izvestiia, 4 February 1942, 2. See also Pravda, 28 April 1942; and Soviet Government Statements, 47. On these events, see Martin Cüppers, Wegbereiter der Shoah: Die Waffen-SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS und die Judenvernichtung 1939–1945 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005), 164–65, 194. 55. Politruk I. Miroshnichenko, “Chudovishchnye zverstva gitlerovskikh merzavtsev v Krymu,” Krasnyi flot, 25 January 1942; Miroshnichenko, “Chudovishchnye zverstva gitlerovtsev v Taganroge,” Krasnyi flot, 15 April 1942; Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 8114 (papers of the Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR), op. 1, d. 942,11. 54–58—copied typescripts of “Mariupol´skaia tragediia,” Sovetskaia Ukraina, 28 February 1942, 3; A. Podchekaev, “Novye zlodeianiia nemetskikh fashistov: Chudovishchnyi akt umershchvleniia sovetskikh detei,” Sovetskaia Ukraina, 4 March 1942, 1; and P. Lidov, “Na razvalinakh Minska i Vitebska,” Pravda, 15 April 1942, 2. 56. It also mentioned the wrong month. See Starshii politruk S. Opershtein, “Chto proiskhodit v Dnepropetrovske,” Izvestiia, 18 April 1942, 3; and Dieter Pohl, “The Murder of Ukraine’s Jews under German Military Administration and in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine,” in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 37–38. 57. “Nota Narodnogo komissara inostrannykh del tov. V. M. Molotova: O chudovishchnykh zlodeianiiakh, zverstvakh i nasiliiakh nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov v okkupirovannykh sovetskikh raionakh i ob otvetstvennosti germanskogo pravitel´stva i komandovaniia za eti prestupleniia,” Pravda, 28 April 1942. A translation is in Soviet Government Statements, 24–51. 58. “Dikie prestupleniia gitlerovskikh liudoedov,” Izvestiia, 20 June 1942, 4. Jews are also mentioned in Politruk I. Mirochnichenko, “Zverstva nemtsev v Mariupole,” Krasnyi flot, 25 June 1942. 59. Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 205. 60. Mikhail Sholokhov, “Nauka nenavisti,” Pravda, 22 June 1942, 3; and Krasnaia zvezda, 23 June 1942. On translations, see Novyi mir 33, no. 2 (1958): 189. For another reference to the singling out of Jewish POWs for murder, see S. Liubimov, “Mozhaisk snova nash, sovetskii!” Komsomol´skaia pravda, 21 January 1942.

notes to pages 96–98 225 61. Izvestiia, 19 June 1942, 2. Ponomarenko probably disliked Jews, given his statement in his July 1941 report to Stalin that Jewish refugees were “seized by a deadly fear of Hitler and don’t fight but flee” (quoted in Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 222–23). 62. Izvestiia, 19 June 1942, 4. 63. Ibid., 3. See also Iu. Paletskis, “Ne zakabalit´ narody Pribaltiki,” Trud, 21 July 1942, 3. 64. “Rech´ deputata Latsisa V. T. (Latviiskaia SSR),” Trud, 19 June 1942, 3, and Izvestiia, 20 June 1942, 2–3. 65. Izvestiia, 20 June 1942, 2. 66. TASS, “Evreiskie pogromy v Rumynii,” Izvestiia, 19 July 1941, 4. 67. The play was Partisans in the Steppes of Ukraine (Weiner, Making Sense of War, 209–10). 68. Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939–1944 (1986; repr., New York: Hippocrene Books, 1990), 154–55; Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, 73–74; Klaus-Peter Friedrich, Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord und das polnisch-jüdische Verhältnis im Diskurs der polnischen Untergrundpresse (1942–1944) (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2006), 51. 69. Friedrich, Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord, 24–25, 51–52. The first public Soviet reference to Nazi gassing in a camp (indeed, to gassing in general) seems to have appeared on 30 July 1942, when TASS reported that a Polish prisoner of the “concentration camp near Tarnów” (a town near Kraków with a prison and a ghetto) had told his visiting wife of experiments with poison. One experiment concerned poisoned clothes, but “‘last year,’ the prisoner told his wife, ‘in this camp were carried out experiments with poison substances. On the night of 5 September [1941], 1,000 prisoners were chased into a room under the ground, into which were inserted gasses. All the prisoners died, and the next day other prisoners removed their corpses’” (TASS, “Chudovishchnye prestupleniia gitlerovskikh palachei v Pol´she,” Trud, 30 July 1942, 4). Historians accept almost the same date for the first gassing murders in Auschwitz, which struck Soviet Jews and members of the Soviet Communist Party. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 941 n. 58. Possibly the first Soviet media reference to the mobile gas vans was the broadcast of a recording made in Moscow in early 1943 of an open letter by a woman to her son-in-law in which she mentioned the gas vans used in the Krasnodar region. See the transcript of the tape recording by Ekaterina Mikhailovna Shvetsova, Moscow, n.d. (probably early 1943) in GARF f. 6903 (Radio Committee of the USSR), op. 1, d. 82,11. 93–94 ob. In March 1943, a censor removed a description of the gas vans used in Krasnodar from the Soviet newsreel (Colonel Cherstvoi, nach. otdela voennoi tsenzury NKO, to Major-General Shikiin, zam. nach. GlavPURKKA, with a copy to Puzin, “Svodka” for 21–31 March 1943, Moscow, 2 April 1943 [RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 187,1. 37]). Later that year, however, the vans did feature in reports on the tribunals in Krasnodar and Kharkiv of July and December 1943; for example, D. Zaslavskii, “‘Dushegubki,’” Pravda, 17 December 1943, 3. 70. “Zaiavlenie Sovetskogo pravitel´stva ob otvetstvennosti gitlerovskikh zakhvatchikov i ikh soobshchnikov za zlodeiianiia, sovershennye imi v okkupirovannykh stranakh Evropy,” Pravda, 15 October 1942, 1; Soviet Government Statements, 51–55. 71. Arad, “Stalin and the Soviet Leadership,” 360. 72. “Sovmestnaia deklaratsiia pravitel´stv Bel´gii, Velikobritanii, Gollandii, Gretsii, Liuksemburga, Norvegii, Pol´shi, Soedinennykh shtatov Ameriki, Soiuza sovetskikh sotsialisticheskikh respublik, Chekhoslovakii, Iugoslavii i Frantsuzskogo natsional´nogo

226  notes to pages 98–101 komiteta o provodimom gitlerovskimi vlastiami istreblenii evreiskogo naseleniia Evropy,” Pravda, 18 December 1942, 1; Izvestiia, 18 December 1942; Krasnaia zvezda, 18 December 1942; Trud, 18 December 1942, 1. 73. Lev Besymenski, “Was das Sowjetvolk vom Holocaust wußte,” in Der Spätstalinismus und die ‘ jüdische Frage’: Zur antisemitischen Wende des Kommunismus, ed. Leonid Luks (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), 75–76. 74. Informbiuro Narkomindela, “Ob osushchestvlenii gitlerovskimi vlastiami plana istrebleniia evreiskogo naseleniia Evropy,” Pravda, 19 December 1942, 1; Izvestiia, 19 December 1942, 1; Krasnaia zvezda, 19 December 1942, 1; Soviet Government Statements, 57–62. 75. N. Matiushkin, “Prokliatie i smert´ nemetsko-fashistskim zakhvatchikam!” Trud, 18 December 1942, 2 (my emphasis). 76. TASS, “Otvet Ruzvel´ta na obrashchenie amerikanskikh evreiskikh organizatsii,” Trud, 13 December 1942, 4. 77. TASS, “Nota pol´skogo pravitel´stva o zverstvakh gitlerovskikh zakhvatchikov,” Trud, 13 December 1942, 4; Republic of Poland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland: Note Addressed to the Governments of the United Nations on December 10th, 1942, and Other Documents (London: For the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1945). 78. TASS, “‘Otvratitel´noe prestuplenie protiv chelovechestva’: Shvedskaia gazeta ob istreblenii gitlerovtsami evreiskogo naseleniia Evropy,” Trud, 22 December 1942, 4; TASS, “Prisoedinenie Kanady k deklaratsii ob˝edinennykh stran ob istreblenii gitlerovtsami evreiskogo naseleniia Evropy,” Trud, 22 December 1942, 4. 79. I. Stalin and V. Molotov, “Tsentral´nomu Komitetu KP(b) Ukrainy: Prezidiumu Verkhovnogo Soveta Ukrainskoi SSR. Sovetu Narodnykh Komissarov Ukrainskoi SSR,” Pravda, 25 December 1942, 1. 80. Editorial, “Da zdravstvuet Sovetskaia Ukraina!” Pravda, 25 December 1942, 1. 81. “Ukraina byla i budet sovetskoi!” Krasnaia zvezda, 25 December 1942, 1. 82. M. Grechukha, L. Korniets, and N. Khrushchev, “K ukrainskomu narodu,” Pravda, 26 December 1942, 3. 83. “Doklad predsedatelia Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov Ukrainskoi SSR tov. L. R. Korniets na torzhestvennom zasedanii v Kolonnom zale Doma soiuzov, posviashchennom 25-letiiu Ukrainskoi SSR,” Pravda, 26 December 1942, 3. Here the casualty figure for Kiev was below the “86,000” mentioned by a Pravda report of 4 July 1942. 84. “Zverstva nemetsko-fashistskikh liudoedov v Rostove-na-Donu,” Pravda, 13 March 1943, 3, also that day’s Izvestiia, Krasnaia zvezda, and Trud; Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 260; Polian, “Stalin,” 91. The draft of the report, with Stalin’s permission for Shcherbakov to publish it (“Mozhno. St”), is at RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 490,11. 73–74. 85. Stalin, O Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine Sovetskogo Soiuza, 95, 111. 86. I. Denisov, “Chto tvorili gitlerovtsy v Velikikh Lukakh,” Trud, 5 January 1943, 2. 87. A. Avdeenko and P. Olender, “Babii Iar (Ot spetsial´nykh korrespondentov ‘Krasnoi zvezdy’),” Krasnaia zvezda, 20 November 1943, 3; Evgenii Kriger, Kiev, 15 November, “Tak bylo v Kieve . . . (Ot spetsial´nogo voennogo korrespondenta ‘Izvestii’),” Izvestiia, 16 November 1943, 2. 88. Nikolai Tikhonov, “Bitva za nashu Sovetskuiu Ukrainu,” Pravda, 20 October 1943, 2;

notes to pages 101–103 227 I. Bachelis, “‘Bitva za nashu Sovetskuiu Ukrainu’: Novyi dokumental´nyi fil´m,” Izvestiia, 22 October 1943, 3. 89. “Ot Sovetskogo Informbiuro: Operativnaia svodka za 15 noiabria,” Pravda, 16 November 1944, 1–2; Besymenski, “Was das Sowjetvolk vom Holocaust wußte,” 73–74. 90. See Marina Sorokina’s chapter in this book. 91. The general postwar report also was never published (ibid.; Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission,” 171–72, 175). 92. The Extraordinary State Commission reports dealing with the RSFSR appeared in Pravda, 7 April 1943, 1–2; 14 July 1943, 1; 5 August 1943, 1–2; 8 September 1943, 2; and 6 November 1943, 2–3. The reports dealing with Ukraine appeared in Pravda, 25 June 1943, 1; 13 November 1943, 2–3; and 13 December 1943, 1. English translations of all except the first and the Smolensk report are in Soviet Government Statements, 82–107. Not relevant here is an Extraordinary State Commission report about the murder of psychiatric patients at the Sapogov Hospital in Kursk oblast, published in Pravda, 25 June 1943, 1. 93. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 213. 94. “O zlodeianiiakh nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov v gg. Viaz´me, Gzhatske i Sychevke Smolenskoi oblasti i v gor. Rzheve Kalininskoi oblasti,” Pravda, 7 April 1943, 1–2. 95. “O zlodeianiiakh nemetsko-fashistskikh okkupantov v Stavropol´skom krae,” Pravda, 5 August 1943, 1–2. Unlike this original, Soviet Government Statements, 82–90, adds a special section title. Sorokina, in her chapter, writes incorrectly that the report did not mention Jews at all. 96. Aleksei Tolstoi, “Korichnevyi durman,” Pravda, 5 August 1943, 2. 97. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 226–27; Al´tman, “Die Wiederspiegelung der nationalsozialistischen Politik,” 23. 98. Aleksei Tolstoi, “Kto takoi Gitler i chego on dobivaetsia?” Izvestiia, 17 July 1941, 3. 99. The general report on extermination appeared in Pravda, 11 March 1944, 2–3. The reports on the RSFSR are in Pravda, 5 May 1944, 3, and 18 August 1944, 2. The reports on Ukraine appeared in Pravda, 1 March 1944, 1–2; 7 May 1944, 3; 14 June 1944, 3; and 23 December 1944, 2–3. The report on Minsk and the Baltic reports are in Pravda, 20 September 1944, 3; 26 November 1944, 2–3; 20 December 1944, 2–3; and 5 April 1945, 2–3. English translations are in Soviet Government Statements, 136–53, 160–82, 189–98, and 225–83. 100. Having quickly agreed with Aleksandrov on a new draft, Shvernik asked Molotov’s permission to publish. Molotov returned the text to Aleksandrov’s superior Shcherbakov on 10 February, with written amendments on it. Khrushchev and Molotov’s deputy Andrei Vyshinskii were then involved somehow. On 17 February, the text returned from Kiev carrying signatures of approval by Khrushchev and the Ukrainian writers Maksym Ryl´s´kyi and Pavlo Tychyna. Eventually, Tolstoi also signed. On 25 February, Shvernik asked Molotov’s permission again, saying that he had followed his order to consult with Shcherbakov and Khrushchev. Molotov himself then again involved Vyshinskii, who added some further changes. On 28 February, Molotov’s secretary finally sent Shvernik a note allowing publication (Bezymenskii, “Informatsiia po-sovetski,” 192–93; facsimile in Stefan Brukhfel’d [Stéphane Bruchfeld] and Pol A. Levin [Paul A. Levine], Peredaite ob etom detiam vashim . . . : Istoriia Kholokosta v Evrope 1933–1945 [Moscow: Tekst, 2000], 94). Unlike these two publications, Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission,” 180–81, gives a complete reference to the archival record (GARF f. 7021 [Extraordinary State Commission], op. 116, d. 36,1. 97).

228  notes to pages 103–105 101. “O razrusheniiakh i zverstvakh, sovershennykh nemetsko-fashistskimi zakhvatchikami v gorode Kieve,” Pravda, 1 March 1944, 2, and other papers; Soviet Government Statements, 141. 102. “O zlodeianiiakh nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov v Estonskoi sovetskoi sotsialisticheskoi respublike,” Pravda, 26 November 1944, 2–3; Soviet Government Statements, 239–40. In contrast, earlier newspaper articles about Klooga called them Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Russians (and overlooked the involvement—probably unknown at that time—in the killing of Estonian policemen). See I. Osipov, “Kostry u stantsii Kloga (Ot spetsial´nogo korrespondenta ‘Izvestii’),” Izvestiia, 28 September 1944, 2; M. Kurganov and A. Vakhov, “Lager´ uzhasa i smerti,” Komsomol´skaia pravda, 3 October 1944, 2; and “Lager´ smerti v poselke Kloga,” Krasnyi flot, 1 October 1944, 3. See also Conclusions of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity (www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions.htm#crimiger1, last accessed 20 August 2008); and Jürgen Matthäus, “Klooga,” in Lexikon des Holocaust, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Munich: Beck, 2002), 124. 103. My emphasis. “Direktivy i prikazy gitlerovskogo pravitel´stva i germanskogo voennogo komandovaniia ob istreblenii sovetskikh voennoplennykh i mirnykh grazhdan,” Pravda, 11 March 1944, 2–3, and other newspapers; Soviet Government Statements, 147. 104. “O razrusheniiakh, grabezhakh i zlodeianiiakh nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov i ikh soobshchnikov v gorode Rovno i Rovenskoi oblasti,” Pravda, 7 May 1944, 3; Soviet Government Statements, 170. 105. “O zlodeianiiakh nemtsev na territorii L´vovskoi oblasti,” Pravda, 23 December 1944, 2–3; Soviet Government Statements, 248. Jews were also mentioned in passing elsewhere. 106. “O zlodeianiiakh nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov v gorode Minsk,” Pravda, 20 September 1944, 3; Soviet Government Statements, 227. 107. “O prestupleniiakh gitlerovskikh zakhvatchikov v Litovskoi Sovetskoi Sotsialisticheskoi Respublike,” Pravda, 20 December 1944, 2–3; Soviet Government Statements, 260. 108. “O prestupleniiakh nemetskikh zakhvatchikov na territorii Latviiskoi Sovetskoi Sotsialistischeskoi Respubliki,” Pravda, 5 April 1945, 2–3; Soviet Government Statements, 278–80. 109. “Sovetskie profsoiuzy sdelaiut vse neobkhodimoe dlia bystreishego razgroma vraga i obespecheniia prochnogo mira: Rech´ rukovoditelia sovetskoi delegatsii, Predsedatelia VTsSPS tov. V. V. Kuznetsova na kongresse britanskikh tred-iunionov v Blekpule,” Trud, 21 October 1944, 3. 110. TASS, “Iden o massovom terrore gitlerovtsev,” Pravda, 12 March 1943, 4. 111. This point was first made in Ewa M. Thompson, “The Katyn Massacre and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the Soviet–Nazi Propaganda War,” in World War II and the Soviet People: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990, ed. John Garrard and Carol Garrard (Houndmills: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 213–32. 112. The claim became that the Polish officers had been engaged in “construction work” west of Smolensk in 1941 (not in 1940) and, less crucially, “Goebbels slanderers” replaced the original “Goebbels propaganda.” See the marked-up draft Sovinformbiuro statement, “Gnusnye izmyshleniia nemetsko-fashistskikh palachei” (RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 490,11. 100–1); and Pravda, 16 April 1943.

notes to pages 105–107 229 113. “Soobshchenie Spetsial´noi komissii po ustanovleniiu i rassledovaniiu obstoiatel´stv rasstrela nemetsko-fashistskimi zakhvatchikami v Katynskom lesu voennoplennykh pol´skikh ofitserov,” Pravda, 26 January 1944, 2–4; Soviet Government Statements, 107–36. 114. TASS, “Vozmushchenie v Bolgarii beschelovechnymi meropriiatiiami vlastei protiv evrei-skogo naseleniia,” Pravda, 14 April 1943, 4. 115. “Pol´skie sotrudniki Gitlera,” Pravda, 19 April 1943, 1, also quoted in Arad, “The Holocaust as Reflected,” 215–16; N. S. Lebedeva et al., eds., Katyn´: Mart 1940 g.–sentiabr´ 2000 g. Rasstrel. Sud´by zhivykh. Ekho Katyni. Dokumenty (Moscow: Ves´ mir, 2001), 455. 116. I. Sergeeva, “Pol´sha—gitlerovskii ‘dom smerti,’” Pravda, 21 April 1943, 4, also quoted in Arad, “The Holocaust as Reflected,” 215–16. 117. I. Barlitskaia, “Gitlerovskie razboiniki v Varshave,” Pravda, 26 June 1941, 6; Tadeush Krushevskii [Tadeusz Kruszewski], “Nenavist´ k germanskim okkupantam bezgranichna: Pis´mo iz Varshavy,” Pravda, 27 June 1941, 6 (“March 1941, Warsaw. Delivered through the USA”), both cited in Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation,” 88; “Varshavskoe getto vymiraet,” Izvestiia, 16 October 1941, 4. 118. B. Ponomarev, “Neprochnyi tyl ‘evropeiskoi kreposti,’” Pravda, 29 May 1943, 4. See also “Gitlerovskii terror v Varshave,” Pravda, 2 June 1943, 4. 119. Thompson, “The Katyn Massacre,” 223. 120. The draft, modified by Stalin, spoke of “fascist butchers.” See the marked-up draft of Sovinformbiuro statement, “Ocherednaia provokatsiia fashistsikh liudoedov” (RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 491,11. 50–54); Pravda, 12 August 1943; and Sovetskaia Ukraina, 13 August 1943, 2. 121. A. Aleksandrova, “Schet krovi: Inostrannaia pechat´ ob istreblenii gitlerovskimi palachami naseleniia okkupirovannykh stran Evropy,” Trud, 7 January 1944, 4. The article also mentions Treblinka (Tremblinka B; this misspelling also appeared in the Polish note of November 1942 and perhaps was its source), Auschwitz, and gas vans. Jews are absent. 122. Vas[ilii] Grossman, “V gorodakh i selakh Pol´shi,” Krasnaia zvezda, 6 August 1944, 3; Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin, 173; Grossman, A Writer at War, 281. Two articles appeared during the war specifically about Sobibór (now identified as Sobibur), erased from the earth by the time the Red Army reached it. One was by the former leader of the revolt of 1943, supposedly writing from the “Acting Army”; in reality, he was hospitalized. Neither article made any reference to Jews. See A. Rutman and S. Krasil´shchik, “Fabrika smerti v Sobibure,” Komsomol´skaia pravda, 2 September 1944; A. Pecherskii, “Vosstanie v lagere smerti—Sobibur,” Komsomol´skaia pravda, 31 January 1945: 2; and S. S. Vilenskii et al., eds., Sobibor (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 2008), 140. 123. This massacre was carried out by Reserve Police Battalion 101, well known through Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); and Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996). 124. K. Simonov, “Lager´ unichtozheniia,” Krasnaia zvezda, 10–12 August 1943, 3, republished in 1944 by Voenizdat as a 45-page brochure. An English translation is in Ilya Ehrenburg and Konstantin Simonov, In One Newspaper: A Chronicle of Unforgettable Years, trans. Anatol Kagan (New York: Sphinx, 1985), 405–30. For the transcript of the broadcast, see GARF f. 6903, op. 12, d. 88,11. 545–47, and d. 89,11. 39–41, 7–9. 125. State Museum at Majdanek, “The History of the Camp” (www.majdanek.pl, accessed 28 August 2008).

230  notes to pages 108–111 126. Evgenii Kriger, “Nemetskaia fabrika smerti pod Liublinom,” Izvestiia, 12 August 1944, 2, and 13 August 1944, 2. 127. Boris Gorbatov, “Lager´ na Maidaneke,” Pravda, 11 August 1944, 2, and 12 August 1944, 3. For a translation, see Boris Gorbatov, “The Camp at Majdanek,” in World War II: Dispatches from the Soviet Front, ed. S. Krasilshchik, trans. Nina Bouis (New York: Sphinx, 1985), 287–99. 128. Pospelov to Shcherbakov, letter, 10 August 1944, and draft of the first part of the article, Boris Gorbatov, “Lager´ na Maidanneke [sic]” (RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 262,11. 34–44). 129. “Kommiunike agentstva ‘Pol´press,’” Izvestiia, 19 August 1944, 4; TASS, “Rassledovanie nemetsko-fashistskikh zlodeianii v Liubline,” Izvestiia, 19 August 1944, 4; TASS, “Zasedanie Chrezvychainoi pol´sko-sovetskoi komissii po rassledovaniiu nemetskofashistskikh zlodeianii v Liubline,” Trud, 20 August 1944, 4; TASS, “Rassledovanie nemetsko-fashistskikh zlodeiianii v Liubline,” Trud, 23 August 1944, 4. 130. “Kommiunike Pol´sko-Sovetskoi Chrezvychainoi Komissii po rassledovaniiu zlodeianii nemtsev, sovershennykh v lagere unichtozheniia na Maidaneke v gorode Liublin,” Pravda, 16 September 1944, 2–3. A translation is in Soviet Government Statements, 210–25. 131. Editorial, “Maidanek,” Pravda, 16 September 1944, 1; Editorial, “Krov´ 1,500,000 ubitykh na Maidaneke vopiet o mshchenii!” Izvestiia, 16 September 1944, 1; editorial, “Maidanek,” Trud, 16 September 1944, 1. 132. TASS, “Sud na palachami Maidaneka,” Pravda, 2 December 1944, 4. 133. “Chudovishchnye zverstva gitlerovtsev v Pol´she,” Trud, 10 March 1943, 3. 134. The other named camps were Demnia and Dekhov, which perhaps stood for Dęblin and Dachau. S. Gerasimov, “Stradaniia i bor´ba pol´skogo naroda,” Trud, 3 April 1943, 4. 135. TASS, “Zverstva gitlerovskikh liudoedov v Pol´she,” Pravda, 14 April 1943, 4, and Trud, 14 April 1943, 4. 136. TASS, “Lager´ smerti v Osventsime,” Pravda, 27 October 1944, 4, and that day’s Izvestiia and Trud; Arad, “The Holocaust as Reflected,” 217. 137. John S. Conway, “The First Report about Auschwitz,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 1 (Chappaqua, NY: Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1984), 134–35, 147. 138. “Soobshchenie amerikanskogo upravleniia po delam bezhentsev o zverstvakh nemtsev v Pol´she,” Pravda, 29 November 1944, 3. The Russian word in the article is Osventsim, which had become by then the Soviet standard transcription from the Polish. 139. TASS, “Zaiavlenie Khella po povodu zverstv gitlerovtsev,” Trud, 16 July 1944, 4. 140. B. Polevoi, “Kombinat smerti v Osventsime (Ot voennogo korrespondenta ‘Pravdy’),” Pravda, 2 February 1945; Arad, “The Holocaust as Reflected,” 217. 141. See, for example, “Chudovishchnye prestupleniia germanskogo pravitel´stva v Osventsime,” Pravda, 7 May 1945, 1; Arad, “The Holocaust as Reflected,” 217. A translation of the Auschwitz report is in Soviet Government Statements, 283–300. The high figure of four million remained official at the former camp until 1990. 142. Il´ia Erenburg, “Krov´ i den´gi,” Krasnaia zvezda, 19 January 1945, 3; Erenburg, “V Germanii,” Krasnaia zvezda, 23 February 1945, 3. 143. Il´ia Erenburg, “Khvatit!” Krasnaia zvezda, 11 April 1945, 3. 144. G. Aleksandrov, “Tovarishch Erenburg oproshchaet,” Pravda, 14 April 1945, 2, and Krasnaia zvezda, 15 April 1945, 2 and elsewhere. 145. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 248. 146. To give one more example: the report “Sud nad gitlerovtsami—uchastnikami

notes to pages 112–113 231 zlodeianii v Maidaneke,” Pravda, 4 December 1944, 4, cited a prosecutor as referring to “Tremblina.” 147. Kerler, “The Soviet Yiddish Press,” 221–49. 148. Eynikayt, 25 November 1943 and 2 December 1943; my English quotation is based on Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, 8; and Weiner, Making Sense of War, 226. Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation,” 87, quotes a revealing article from Soviet Ukraine’s Yiddish newspaper, Der Shtern, 7 July 1941; obviously, that paper also deserves further study. 149. “Druga bitwa o Warszawę,” Wolna Polska, no. 14, 8 June 1943, 1, filed at RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 193,1. 114. 150. Major Bernhard Bechler in Freies Deutschland, no. 23, 19 December 1943, 3, quoted in Das Schwarzbuch: Der Genozid an den sowjetischen Juden, ed. Wassili Grossman, Ilja Ehrenburg, and Arno Lustiger (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994), 987. 151. Jörg Ganzenmüller, Das belagerte Leningrad, 1941–1944: Die Stadt in den Strategien von Angreifern und Verteidigern (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2005). 152. See, for example, Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004), 164–86 (on Kiev); Norbert Kunz, “Das Beispiel Charkow: Eine Stadtbevölkerung als Opfer der deutschen Hungerstrategie 1941/42,” in Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Bilanz einer Debatte, ed. Christian Hartmann et al. (Munich: Beck, 2005), 136–44; and A. V. Skorobohatov, Kharkiv u chasy nimets´koï okupatsiï (1941–1943) (Kharkiv: Prapor, 2004), 82–98. 153. Pravda, 28 April 1942; Soviet Government Statements, 25–26; D. Leont´ev, “‘Zelena papka Geringa,’” Pravda, 4 May 1942, 3, and 7 May 1942, 4. 154. Editorial, “V okkupirovannykh raionakh,” Krasnaia zvezda, 8 July 1942, 1. 155. TASS, “Krovavye plany gitlerovskikh liudoedov. ‘Raz˝iasneniia’ Gimmlera o zadachakh ‘germanizatsii Vostoka,’” Trud, 28 August 1942, 4; English translation modified from Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1981), 279. 156. A. Leont´ev, “Istrebitel´naia voina Gitlera,” Pravda, 26 July 1943, 4. Compare Arad, “The Holocaust as Reflected,” 213, which concludes that this article suggested that Hitler’s war was not against Jews. 157. See, for example, on POW camps in southern Russia, A. Surkov, “Po lageriam smerti,” Krasnaia zvezda, 10 April 1943, 3. 158. Hans-Heinrich Nolte, “Osariči 1944,” in Orte des Grauens: Verbrechen im Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Gerd R. Ueberschär (Darmstadt: Primus, 2003), 187–94; “Ot grazhdan Sovetskoi Belorussii, osvobozhdennykh nashei doblestnoi Krasnoi Armiei iz nemetskogo lageria smerti v raione mestechka Azarichi, Polesskoi oblasti. Moskva, Kreml. Tovarishchu STALINU,” Izvestiia, 16 April 1944, 2; Mikola Sadkovich, “Pust´ osenit ikh schast´e,” Izvestiia, 16 April 1944, 2; Iakub Kolas, “Lager´ smerti,” Izvestiia, 19 April 1944, 4, translated (almost in full) as Yakub Kolas, “Death Camp,” in World War II: Dispatches from the Soviet Front, 246–49. The Extraordinary State Commission report is “Istreblenie gitlerovtsami sovetskikh liudei putem zarazheniia sypnym tifom,” Pravda, 30 April 1944, 2, translated in Soviet Government Statements, 153–59. 159. Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 27–29; Jeremy D. Harris, “Broadcasting the Massacres: An Analysis of the BBC’s Contemporary Coverage of the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies 25 (1996): 65–98.

232  notes to pages 113–115 160. The newspaper carried a total of 1,186 stories about European Jews. See Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2–3. 161. Abraham A. Kreusler, A Teacher’s Experiences in the Soviet Union (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965), 154. 162. As noted, for example, by Arad, “Stalin and the Soviet Leadership,” 356; Arad, “The Holocaust as Reflected,” 218; and Löwe, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Press,” 37–38. 163. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 226–27; Arad, “The Holocaust as Reflected,” 215. Arad mentions the foreign policy factor only for the time of the Katyn affair. Kostyrchenko also gives an exaggerated description of Soviet propaganda to foreign countries: from the very first months, it offered the “maximum information about the tragedy and heroism of Soviet Jewry,” and “of course, descriptions of the facts of the Hitlerite genocide of the Jews in Soviet territory in Soviet propaganda material for the West were not subject to censorship, let alone excision” (Tainaia politika Stalina, 229). This cannot be reconciled with the treatment of the above-quoted passage in Sholokhov´s story “The Science of Hatred” about the shooting of Jews; at least one Soviet-sponsored translation omitted the passage about the Jews. See Mikhail Sholokhov, The Science of Hatred (New York: New Age Publishers, 1943). 164. I owe this insight to Vladimir Solonari. 165. Il´ia Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn´: Vospominaniia, 3 vols., rev. and enlarged ed. (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1990), 2:441 n. 166. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 271–73; Weiner, Making Sense of War, 289. 167. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 263; full text in Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 30. 168. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 268. In a party journal, Fadeev himself defended the “national pride of the peoples of the USSR” against “sanctimonious preaching of groundless ‘cosmopolitanism’” (Weiner, Making Sense of War, 195–96). 169. L. Liuks [Leonid Luks], “Evreiskii vopros v politike Stalina,” Voprosy istorii, no. 7 (1999): 45. 170. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 266. 171. Kondakov was removed one year later after he was found to have embezzled money (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 246–47). A partial publication of Kondakov’s report is in Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 48–49. 172. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 225. 173. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 245; Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 35–36. 174. David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 125, 159. 175. A. Aleksandrov, “Gitlerovskaia Germaniia lopnet pod tiazhest´iu svoikh prestuplenii,” Pravda, 4 December 1941, 3, quoted in Bezymenskii, “Informatsiia po-sovetski,” 193–94. 176. Liuks, “Evreiskii vopros v politike Stalina,” 44–45; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 259–61. Full text in Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 27–29. 177. In response, the Secretariat of the Central Committee on 26 July 1944 decided to close the institute. But Stalin, influenced by Simonov and dissenting CC members such as Zhdanov, blocked the decision (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 269–71).

notes to pages 115–116 233 178. Redlich, War, Holocaust, and Stalinism, 366. 179. A. N. Ponomarev, Aleksandr Shcherbakov: Stranitsy biografii (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Glavarkhiva Moskvy, 2004), 228. 180. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 227. Similarly, Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, 381 n. 6, states that Kondakov’s comment “no doubt . . . reflected Shcherbakov’s attitude.” 181. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin, 189. 182. Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, 382 n. 6, citing Harrison E. Salisbury, To Moscow and Beyond: A Reporter’s Narrative (New York: Harper, 1960), 68; and Maurice Hindus, House without a Roof: Russia after Forty-Three Years of Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 311. 183. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 242. 184. Nicolas Werth and Gaël Moullec, ed. and trans., Rapports secrets soviétiques: La société russe dans les documents confidentiels 1921–1991. Recueil de pièces d’archives provenant du Centre de conservation de la documentation contemporaine, du Centre russe de conservation et d’étude des documents d’histoire contemporaine, des Archives d’État de la Féderation de Russie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 228–30. One of Ehrenburg’s daughters also remembered many Muscovites making antisemitic remarks; see Jörg Baberowski, Der rote Terror: Die Geschichte des Stalinismus (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2003), 221. 185. Baberowski, Der rote Terror, 219 (on Rostov); Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 225 (on frontline villages); Kreusler, A Teacher’s Experiences in the Soviet Union, 157. 186. Kreusler, A Teacher’s Experiences in the Soviet Union, 51, 95 (on Stalingrad); Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 243; full texts in Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 32–34. For further discussion, see Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 179. 187. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 179; Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 243. 188. Tsentral´nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads´kykh ob˝iednan´ Ukraïny f. 1, op. 23 (Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine [Osobyi sektor—sekretnaia chast´]), d. 685, ll. 82–87 (Sergienko, NKVD U[k]SSR to N. S. Khrushchev, secretary of the CC of the CP(b)U, “Spetsial´noe soobshchenie,” n.p., 22 March 1943). 189. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 271–72; full text in Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 36–37. 190. Al´tman, “Die Wiederspiegelung der nationalsozialistischen Politik,” 17–19. On this matter, see also Liuks, “Evreiskii vopros v politike Stalina,” 44; Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, 300; Lustiger, Rotbuch, 121–22; and Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 271. Arad, “Stalin and the Soviet Leadership,” 203, 219, puts it particularly forcefully: “By publishing the truth, that the Jews were the only people being totally annihilated, the Soviet press would in some way confirm and serve the German propaganda.” 191. Harris, “Broadcasting the Massacres”; David Cesarani, “Great Britain,” in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, ed. David S. Wyman and Charles H. Rosenzweig (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 607–8. 192. Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, 28–29. See also his review of Leff, Buried by the Times, in the Washington Post, 1 May 2005, BW06.

234  notes to pages 116–119 193. V. A. Zolotarev et al., eds., Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia otechestvennaia voina, vol. 17-6 (Moscow: Terra, 1996), 162–63. 194. The meagerness stands out when compared with the abundance of the documentation about propaganda produced by Nazi officials, which enables thorough studies such as Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006). 195. “Luchshe ne govorit´, chto nemtsy ubivaiut evreev.” See Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn´, 441 n. 196. Kiril Feferman, “Soviet Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR: Documenting the Holocaust,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 4 (2003): 592.

Chapter 6. People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR This article was written within the framework of a project supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Germany). I am deeply grateful to Professor Dietrich Beyrau, Ingrid Schierle, Jan Plamper, and all my colleagues at the University of Tübingen’s Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte und Landeskunde, whose help and support was always there for this work. 1. In fact, the substantial bibliography edited by Norman Tutorow, War Crimes, War Criminals, and War Crimes Trials: An Annotated Bibliography and Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986), which lists thousands of publications, includes almost no works dedicated to the history of the investigation of Nazi crimes in the USSR. 2. On the role of the Soviet academic elite, including its role during the war, see, for example, Vladimir D. Esakov, ed., Akademiia nauk v resheniiakh Politbiuro TsK RKP(b)VKP(b), 1922–1952 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000); Manfred Khainemann [Heinemann] and Eduard I. Kolchinskii, eds., Za “zheleznym zanavesom”: Mify i realii sovetskoi nauki (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2002); Marina Iu. Sorokina, “Russkaia nauchnaia elita i sovetskii totalitarizm (ochen´ sub˝ektivnye zametki),” in Lichnost´ i vlast´ v istorii Rossii XIX–XX vv.: Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii, ed. A. N. Tsamutali (St. Petersburg: Nestor, 1997), 248–54; Vadim Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001); Michael David-Fox and György Péteri, eds., Academia in Upheaval: Origins, Transfers, and Transformations of the Communist Academic Regime in Russia and East Central Europe (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2000); Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Vera Tolz, Russian Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Professionalism and Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); and Alexander Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1917–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 3. I might add that the problem of “scholarship and war” has been examined in Russian historiography from only one angle: the role that scholars played in the victory over the Nazis. See the chapters by Boris V. Levshin on medicine and scholarship in the war years in Voina i obshchestvo, 1941–1945 gg., 2 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 2004), vol. 2. See also Elena I. Grakina, Uchenye Rossii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–45 (Moscow: IRI RAN, 2000); Boris V. Levshin, Sovetskaia nauka v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 1983); Pavel V. Volobuev, Levshin, and Vladimir M. Orel, eds., Nauka i uchenye Rossii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–45: Ocherki, vospominaniia, dokumenty (Moscow: Nauka, 1996); Orel and Arsenii A. Parkhomenko, Nauka i uchenye

notes to pages 119–122 235 Moskvy v gody trudnykh ispytanii: Moskva nauchnaia (Moscow: Ianus-K, 1997), 468–95; and Parkhomenko and Aleksandr S. Fedorov, Srazhaiushchaiasia nauka (Moscow: Znanie, 1990). 4. The book Bibliografiia rabot o Niurnbergskom protsesse nad glavnymi voennymi prestupnikami (Moscow: Institut gosudarstva i prava AN SSSR, 1986) is the best confirmation of this. 5. See Boris S. Utevskii, Sudebnye protsessy o zlodeianiiakh nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov na territorii SSSR (Moscow: Iuridicheskoe izdatel´stvo, 1946); Sergei Ia. Rozenblit, Pokazaniia svidetelei i podsudimykh v mezhdunarodnom ugolovnom protsesse (Moscow: Iuridicheskoe izdatel´stvo, 1948); and Mark Iu. Raginskii and Rozenblit, Mezhdunarodnyi protsess glavnykh iaponskikh voennykh prestupnikov (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo AN SSSR, 1950). 6. See Viktor B. Konasov and Aleksandr L. Kuz´minykh, Nemetskie voennoplennye v SSSR: Istoriografiia, bibliografiia, spravochno-poniatiinyi apparat (Vologda: Vologodskii institut razvitiia obrazovaniia, 2002). 7. For more detail, see Marina V. Babich, Gosudarstvennye uchrezhdeniia XVIII veka: Komissii Petrovskogo vremeni (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003). 8. The materials can be found in the Russian State Historical Archive (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv [RGIA]) f. 601 (Chrezvychainaia sledstvennaia komissia A. Krivtsova); the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [GARF]) f. R–470; and GARF f. R–7628. See also Nashi vragi: Obzor deistvii Chrezvychainoi sledstvennoi komissii dlia rassledovaniia narushenii zakona i obychaev voiny avstro-vengerskimi i germanskimi voiskami, vol. 1 (Petrograd: N.p., 1916). The materials of the Denikin Commission from the collection of the National Labor Union in Frankfurt, as well as the collections of Boris N. Nikolaevskii and Petr N. Vrangel´ in the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, have been published in book form: Iurii G. Fel´shtinskii, ed., Krasnyi terror v gody grazhdanskoi voiny po materialam Osoboi sledstvennoi komissii po rassledovaniiu zlodeianii bol´shevikov (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1992), although the results are less than satisfactory. 9. See, for instance, N. A. Zolotarev, ed., Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina, 1941–1945: Voenno-istoricheskie ocherki, 4 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1998–99); and on the restriction of access to military archives, see Georgii R. Ramazishvili, “Tsentral´nyi arkhiv Ministerstva oborony Rossiiskoi Federatsii: Problemy dostupa k dokumentam,” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 2 (2004): 70. The recent pompous Russian celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Great Victory offers substantial support for this conclusion. 10. See Nina Tumarkin, “The Great Patriotic War as Myth and Memory,” Atlantic Monthly 267, no. 6 (1991): 26–44; Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Tumarkin, “The War of Remembrance,” in Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 194–207. See also Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London: Granta, 2002). 11. These figures are found in Sergei Kuz´min, Ikh zakapyvali zhivymi . . . : Natsistskikh prestupnikov—k otvetu! (Moscow: Politizdat, 1983), 44; and Natal´ia S. Lebedeva, Podgotovka Niurnbergskogo protsessa (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), 26–31. They are based on the Extraordinary State Commission’s own calculations. 12. The chairman of the Sovinformbiuro Commission, which was supposed to provide

236  notes to pages 122–124 for the publication abroad of new data on Nazi crimes, left an exquisite description of the atmosphere of secrecy: “We were only allowed to sit near the folders containing the papers and twiddle our thumbs, since without the permission of the director it was forbidden to open the folders and actually read them. We sat there, waited awhile, then left without having done anything” (GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 326, l. 31). See also GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 404 (on permission to work in the Extraordinary State Commission archive). 13. As the writer Vasilii Grossman testified in a speech at a session of the JAC on 25 April 1946, the Extraordinary State Commission materials were a “little disappointing.” In his words, he was not able to find the materials he needed, having been given only a few protocols from the interrogations of German witnesses and German antifascists. See Il´ia Al´tman, “‘Chernaia kniga’: Zhizn´ i sud´ba,” Gorizont, no. 10 (1989): 34. Along the same lines, the JAC secretary Itsik (Isaac) Fefer wrote that without the permission of the Extraordinary State Commission not a single document could be published (GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 404, l. 14). 14. For just a few of many examples, see D. F. Grigorovich et al., eds., Sovetskaia Ukraina v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945: Dokumenty i materialy, 3 vols. (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1985); Vinnychchyna v roki Velykoi vitchyznianoi viiny, 1941–1945 rr.: Zbirnyk dokumentiv i materialiv (Odessa: Maiak, 1971); Z. I. Beluga et al., eds., Prestupleniia nemetsko-fashistskikh okkupantov v Belorussii, 1941–1944 (Minsk: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo BSSR, 1965); and Kh. Kh. Kamalov, R. V. Serdnak, and Iu. S. Tokarev, eds., 900 geroicheskikh dnei: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov o geroicheskoi bor´be trudiashchikhsia Leningrada v 1941–1944 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1966). 15. Now the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii [RGASPI]), formerly the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (TsPA IML). 16. On Molotov, see RGASPI f. 82 (V. M. Molotov), op. 2, d. 512. Meanwhile, even in 1947 the Main Archival Administration (GAU) of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs issued an order to hand over all materials on A. N. Tolstoi to the A. M. Gor´kii Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. See Elena Iu. Litvin, “Arkhiv A. N. Tolstogo v IMLI,” in A. N. Tolstoi: Novye materialy i issledovaniia, ed. V. V. Petelin (Moscow: Nasledie, 1995), 192. 17. Lebedeva, Podgotovka Niurnbergskogo protsessa. 18. A. E. Epifanov, Otvetstvennost´ gitlerovskikh voennykh prestupnikov i ikh posobnikov v SSSR (Volgograd: N.p., 1997), published under the imprimatur of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. I might also note that in 1986, at the Moscow State Historical-Archival Institute, Tat´iana V. Borisova defended a senior thesis (diplomnaia rabota) on the Extraordinary State Commission under the direction of Tat´iana P. Korzhikhina. 19. The texts of a substantial number of reports that were prepared but never published can also be found in the Extraordinary State Commission archive. See GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d.d. 142–78. 20. GARF f. R–7021, op. 149, d. 172. 21. Pavel N. Knyshevskii, Dobycha: Tainy germanskikh reparatsii (Moscow: Soratnik, 1994), 5. 22. Lev A. Bezymenskii, “Informatsiia po-sovetski,” Znamia, no. 5 (1998): 191–99; Bezymenskii, “Vospriiatie Kholokosta v Sovetskom Soiuze,” Rossiia i sovremennyi mir, no. 4 (1999): 153–68.

notes to page 124 237 23. For the most important Soviet documents on this topic published in Russia in 1997–2000 alone, see Rudolf G. Pikhoia and Aleksandr Geishtor, eds., Katyn´: Plenniki neob˝iavlennoi voiny. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 1997); Natal´ia S. Lebedeva, ed., Katyn´: Mart 1940 g.–sentiabr´ 2000 g. Rasstrel. Sud´by zhivykh. Ekho Katyni. Dokumenty (Moscow: Ves´ mir, 2001); and Inessa S. Iazhborovskaia, Anatolii Iu. Iablokov, and Valentina S. Parsadanova, Katynskii sindrom v sovetsko-pol´skikh i rossiisko-pol´skikh otnosheniiakh (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001). 24. Thus the authors of Cherekskaia tragediia published data about the falsification of information in the Cherek district of Kabardino-Balkariia, where the local authorities and the auxiliary commission blamed the Nazis for the punitive actions of the NKVD and the material losses the population sustained in supplying the Soviet Thirty-Seventh Army. See K. G. Azamatov et al., Cherekskaia tragediia (Nal´chik: El´brus, 1994). The well-known American researcher Patricia Kennedy Grimsted cites analogous facts in connection with the destruction of cultural treasures in Kiev (Grimsted, Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2001], 184–88). For a different point of view, see Nikolai V. Petrovskii, Sokrytye stranitsy istorii (Moscow: KRUK-Prestizh, 2002), 68–78; and Margarita S. Zinich, Pokhishchennye sokrovishcha: Vyvoz natsistami rossiiskikh kul´turnykh tsennostei (Moscow: IRI RAN, 2003). Aleksandr A. Formozov also confirms that Soviet propaganda placed the blame for the destruction and damage done to cultural monuments in the 1930s on the Nazis, as well as on portions of the Red Army. See Formozov, Russkie arkheologi v period totalitarizma (Moscow: Znak, 2004), 290. Russian archivists say that the large losses sustained by the State Archival Fund in the war years, long blamed on Hitler’s forces, were actually the consequence either of bad evacuation planning or conscious destruction (for various reasons) by the archival officials themselves. See Ol´ga N. Kopylova, “K probleme sokhrannosti GAF SSSR v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” Sovetskie arkhivy, no. 5 (1990): 37–45; and Tat´iana V. Khorkhordina, Istoriia Otechestva i arkhivy: 1917–1980-e gg. (Moscow: RGGU, 1994), 264–71. Finally, church historians note that the mass destruction of religious buildings belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church, about which much was written that described it as the barbarism of the invaders, in fact occurred on a large scale even before the war. See Mikhail V. Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov´ pri Staline i Khrushcheve (Gosudarstvenno-tserkovnye otnosheniia v SSSR v 1939–1964 gg.) (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Krutitskogo Patriarshego podvor´ia, 2000), 92, 98, 117–18, 146. For information on western Ukraine, see Oleh Romaniv and Inna Fedushchak, Zakhidnoukrains´ka trahediia 1941 (L´viv: Naukove tovarystvo imeni T. Shevchenka, 2002). The bitter example of the Polish town of Jedwabne also indicates the need for further careful study of the history of war crimes. See Ian [Jan] Gross, Sosedi: Istoriia unichtozheniia evreiskogo mestechka (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 2002). Marci Shore reviews the literature on Jedwabne, including the English and Polish editions of Gross’s book, in her contribution to the present book. 25. On the use of the facts of Stalinist and Nazi war crimes in the nascent culture of post-Soviet memory, see Irina Paperno, “Exhuming the Bodies of Soviet Terror,” Representations 75 (Summer 2001): 89–118, which cites the relevant literature on the subject. I thank Jan Plamper for bringing this work to my attention. 26. For examples of the uncritical use of Extraordinary State Commission documents, see Aleksei A. Sheviakov, “Gitlerovskii genotsid na territoriiakh SSSR,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 12 (1991): 3–11; and Sheviakov, “Zhertvy sredi mirnogo naseleniia v gody

238  notes to pages 125–126 Otechestvennoi voiny,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 11 (1992): 3–17. Even the latest solid monograph on the subject—Pavel M. Polian, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur: Zhizn´, trud, unizhenie i smert´ sovetskikh voennoplennykh i ostarbaiterov na chuzhbine i na rodine (Moscow: Rosspen, 2002), which begins with the publication of Extraordinary State Commission tables titled “General Data on the Number of Victims of the Atrocities of the Germans and Their Accomplices in the Territories of the USSR as of 1 March 1946” (10–11)—does not consider how these totals were calculated and does not subject the Extraordinary State Commission data to critical analysis. 27. Iakov Semenovich Khavinson (1901–92) was the principal director of TASS, a member of the Sovinformbiuro, and from 1942 on, the head of the Sovinformbiuro’s Department of Counterpropaganda. In 1943–46, he was a member of the editorial board and head of the foreign department of Pravda, and he later served as Pravda’s permanent correspondent for international affairs (under the pseudonym M. Marinin). On the modernization of Soviet propaganda, Vladimir A. Nevezhin, Sindrom nastupatel´noi voiny: Sovetskaia propaganda v preddverii “sviashchennykh boev,” 1939–1941 gg. (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1997), 145–47, 214–15. 28. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 51, ll. 24–25. 29. Ibid. Such persons included, in Khavinson’s opinion: Academicians N. N. Burdenko (physician and committee chair), A. A. Bogomolets (physician), P. L. Kapitsa (physicist), and A. N. Bakh (biochemist), all of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; Professor M. P. Konchalovskii; the lawyers N. V. Kommodov, I. D. Braude, and S. K. Kaznacheev; the writers S. N. Sergeev-Tsenskii and A. S. Novikov-Priboi; director M. F. Andreeva of the House of Scientists; and Soviet People’s Artist A. K. Tarasova. 30. Georgii Fedorovich Aleksandrov (1908–61) was head of the Soviet Communist Party’s Bureau of Agitation and Propaganda in 1940–47; Academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1943); director of the Institute of Philosophy, Soviet Academy of Sciences (1947–54); and Soviet minister of culture (March 1954–March 1955). After a scandal involving his personal life in 1955, he was forced to leave the Communist Party. From 1956 to the end of his life, he was an official of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences. 31. Aleksandrov removed the names of Academicians A. A. Bogomolets and A. N. Bakh, the lawyers N. V. Kommodov and S. K. Kaznacheev (in December 1943 both had served as defense attorneys during a trial for Nazi atrocities at Khar´kov, the first trial in which German soldiers appeared as defendants), the writer S. N. Sergeev-Tsenskii, and the actress M. F. Andreeva. He added Iudin (it is unclear exactly which Iudin was meant—the famous surgeon Sergei Sergeevich, or Pavel Fedorovich, the director of the Institute of Philosophy, Soviet Academy of Sciences), the writer Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, and the pilots Valentina Grizodubova and Nikolai Gastello (the appearance of this last name in the document seems incredible, as the crew of an airplane captained by Gastello slammed into a column of enemy troops and perished on 26 June 1941). 32. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 51, l. 26. 33. On the various forms of Soviet propaganda during World War II and their influence on the postwar mood in the USSR, see Aleksandr O. Chubar´ian, ed., Stalinskoe desiatiletie kholodnoi voiny: Fakty i gipotezy (Moscow: Nauka, 1999); Vladimir S. Lel´chuk and Efim I. Pivovar, eds., SSSR i kholodnaia voina (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995); Vladimir D. Esakov and Elena S. Levina, Delo KR: Sudy chesti v ideologii i praktike poslevoennogo stalinizma (Moscow: IRI RAN, 2001); Nevezhin, Sindrom nastupatel´noi voiny; Shimon Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish

notes to page 126 239 Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–48 (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1982); Serhy Yekelchyk, “Stalinist Patriotism as Imperial Discourse: Reconciling the Ukrainian and Russian ‘Heroic Pasts,’” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 1 (2002): 51–80; Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds., The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Roger D. Markwick, “Stalinism at War,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 3 (2002): 509–20; and Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 34. In particular, despite several centuries of ties (dynastic, economic, political, and cultural) with Germany, the future military adversary was poorly and one-dimensionally known in the USSR. Neither in the Russian empire nor in the prewar USSR was there a single scholarly center specializing in the study of Germany as a whole—although Germany had a wide network of scholarly research institutes and subdivisions within various departments and societies that were engaged in collecting and systematizing information on Russia and the USSR. For more detail, see Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Gabriele Camphausen, Die wissenschaftliche historische Russlandforschung im Dritten Reich, 1933–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990); and Mechtild Rössler, “Wissenschaft und Lebensraum”: Geographische Ostforschung im Nationalsozialismus. Ein Beitrag zur Disziplingeschichte der Geographie (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1990). This situation was repeatedly reported to the higher party leadership. In March 1941, the director of the First Western Division of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS), RimskiiKorsakov, bluntly warned that the official study of the USSR in Germany was unusually wide-ranging and thorough, while in the USSR analytical materials on Germany were carelessly written, based on desultory materials, and as a result “our information is shoddy” (RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 34, l. 2). 35. Nevezhin, Sindrom nastupatel´noi voiny, 122–23, 145. 36. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 244, l. 103. 37. See “Zaniat´sia podgotovkoi budushchego mira,” Istochnik, no. 4 (1995): 114–58; Oleg A. Rzheshevskii, “K istorii anglo-sovetskogo dogovora 1942 g.,” in Vtoraia mirovaia voina: Aktual´nye problemy. K 50-letiiu Pobedy, ed. Rzheshevskii (Moscow: Nauka, 1995); and Aleksandr Pyzhikov and Aleksandr Danilov, Rozhdenie sverkhderzhavy, 1945–53 gody (Moscow: OLMA-Press, 2002), 13. 38. A long-time party member (since 1901), Lozovskii served in 1921–37 as the general secretary of Profintern and in 1939–46 as deputy people’s commissar of foreign affairs, while simultaneously he was appointed as deputy director of the Sovinformbiuro in 1941; he served as director in 1945–48. On his initiative in April 1942, the Jewish Antifascist Committee was created, as a result of which Lozovskii was arrested in 1949 and shot. 39. See “Zaniat´sia podgotovkoi,” 114–15. The latter initiative was quickly approved and on 28 January 1942, by a decision of the Politburo, the Commission on Postwar Plans for the State Organization of the Countries of Europe, Asia, and Other Parts of the World was created, headed by People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Molotov. Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Vyshinskii was made co-chairman of one of the commission’s working groups (for preparing proposals for Western and Northern Europe and the British empire).

240  notes to pages 127–129 40. Nikolai Alekseevich Voznesenskii (1903–50) was a candidate member of the Politburo; he became first deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR in February 1941. From 1943 on, he belonged to the council’s Committee for Revitalization of the Economy in Areas Liberated from the German Fascist Occupiers. He wrote The Economy of the USSR during World War II and in 1943 was named an academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In March 1949, a Politburo decree relieved him of all leadership duties, recalled him from the Politburo, and expelled him from the Party; in August of that year he was arrested as part of the Leningrad affair. He was executed on 30 September 1950. Aleksei Nikolaevich Kosygin (1904–80) served in 1940–46 as deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, and in 1943–46 he was simultaneously the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR. From January to July 1942, during the blockade of Leningrad, he represented the State Committee on Defense. Years later, from 1964–80, he served as chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. 41. Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii Ministerstva inostrannykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii [AVP RF MID RF]) f. 6 (Molotov’s secretariat), op. 4, d. 69, file 7 (“On the Formation of the Extraordinary State Commission”), ll. 1–11. 42. Ibid., l. 9. 43. Lebedeva, Podgotovka Niurnbergskogo protsessa, 18–19. For more detailed information about the international context of the creation of the Extraordinary State Commission, see Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 44. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 79, ll. 9–11. 45. This was evident in the fact that unlike Khavinson, Aleksandrov referred to the Russian experience of creating analogous institutions: the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Violations of the Rules and Customs of War (1915) and the Commission for the Calculation of the Consequences of the Intervention and the Civil War. I would note that the results of the work of both commissions were pitiful, for neither pre- nor postrevolutionary Russia had a system for tallying war victims; all calculations were based on probability. See A. I. Stepanov, “Obshchie demograficheskie poteri naseleniia Rossii v period pervoi mirovoi voiny,” in Pervaia mirovaia voina: Prolog XX veka, ed. V. L. Mal´kov (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), 482. 46. Specifically, Nikita S. Khrushchev, P. K. Ponomarenko, I. Ia. Vares, V. M. Bochkov, I. A. Serov, G. A. Miterev, V. P. Potemkin, V. G. Dekanozov, V. L. Komarov, E. S. Varga, V. S. Nemchinov, and A. N. Tolstoi. 47. For more on Shcherbakov, see Anatolii N. Ponomarev, Aleksandr Shcherbakov: Stranitsy biografii (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 2004). 48. Epifanov, Otvetstvennost´ gitlerovskikh prestupnikov i ikh posobnikov v SSSR, 19–20. 49. Konstantin Aleksandrovich Umanskii (1902–45) served in the 1930s as a TASS correspondent in Western Europe and was a connoisseur of the Russian avant-garde and painting. He directed the press department of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (NKID) until 1939, then served as ambassador to the United States, and in 1941–43 was a member of the NKID board. In June 1943, he was named ambassador to Mexico. In January 1945, he died in an airplane crash under obscure circumstances.

notes to page 130 241 50. Aleksei Fedorovich Gorkin (1897–1988) was a secretary of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1938–52, 1956–57). 51. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 79, ll. 14–20; AVP RF MID RF f. 6 (Molotov’s secretariat), op. 4, d. 69, file 7 (“On the Formation of the Extraordinary State Commission”), l. 17. 52. The committee was to be led by the chairman of Soviet trade unions, N. M. Shvernik. Nominees for membership included the chairmen of the presidiums of the seven Soviet republics occupied in whole or in part by the Germans (the RSFSR, Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldavia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia); the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Karelo-Finnish SSR; the party secretaries of the Leningrad Oblast Committee and the Moscow City Committee; the presidents of various Soviet academies—the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, the All-Union Academy of Architecture, and the Lenin All-Union Agricultural Academy (VASKhNIL); retired but famous marshals, patriotic writers, and academicians; the people’s commissars of finance, justice, and health; the deputy people’s commissar of internal affairs; the director of Gosplan’s Central Bureau of National Economic Accounting; the chief of public security and education of the RSFSR; the secretaries of the Central Committee of Trade Unions (VTsSPS), the Komsomol Central Committee (TsK VLKSM), and the Union of Architects; and the metropolitan. Specifically, these were A. E. Badaev, M. S. Grechukha, N. Ia. Natalevich, F. G. Brovko, Iu. I. Paletskis, A. M. Kirkhenshtein, I. Ia. Vares, N. S. Prokkonen, A. A. Zhdanov, A. S. Shcherbakov, V. L. Komarov, V. A. Vesnin, T. D. Lysenko, S. M. Budennyi, B. M. Shaposhnikov, A. N. Tolstoi, A. E. Korneichuk, V. L. Vasilevskaia, I. G. Erenburg, N. N. Burdenko, B. E. Vedeneev, E. V. Tarle, A. G. Zverev, N. M. Rychkov, G. A. Miterev, S. N. Kruglov, V. N. Starovskii, A. P. Grishakova, V. P. Potemkin, K. I. Nikolaeva, O. P. Mishakova, K. S. Alabian, and Metropolitan Nikolai of Kiev and Galicia. 53. AVP RF MID RF f. 6 (Molotov’s secretariat), op. 4, d. 65, file 6, l. 56. 54. Ibid., ll. 1–3. 55. Ibid., d. 69, file 7 (“On the Formation of the Extraordinary State Commission”), ll. 31–32. An important annotation to the letter states that it was printed in three copies, including copies for Stalin and Molotov. What Lozovskii wrote is worth quoting in full: Materials on German atrocities are located in dozens of sites around the country. They can be found in such places as the central committees of Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Moldavian Autonomous Republic; in regional and city committees; among the political workers of regiments, divisions, and fronts; and in the RKKA (Main Political Administration of the Red Army), Razvedupr (Central Intelligence Service of the Red Army), the NKVD, and the People’s Commissariat of Health. The originals of a number of documents have already been lost, with only copies remaining. There has still been no full accounting of those who carried out these atrocities on the spot or the bosses who organized them (name, rank, place of activity, and so forth). I do not know the location of the original reports or the protocols of the commissions that have carried out investigations and inquiries into the atrocities. Probably they are scattered around various institutions. We have very important testimony on German atrocities from prisoners of war, but this testimony is to be found in part in the RKKA and in part with the NKVD and elsewhere. It is time to gather all these materials in one place, sort them, and start up files on each of the generals, colonels, majors, lieutenants, and privates both within and outside the SS. It is necessary to gather testimony from eyewitnesses while the trail is still hot and get their official signatures. All this will be necessary for us when we prepare our final results.

242  notes to pages 131–133 56. AVP RF MID RF f. 6 (Molotov’s secretariat), op. 4, d. 69, file 7 (“On the Formation of the Extraordinary State Commission”), ll. 18–24. 57. At the same time, Lozovskii, who was in Kuibyshev at the time, sent Molotov a telegram with some new suggestions on 29 October 1942: “If the ‘State Commission for the Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Plunderers’ has still not been confirmed,” he wrote, then I would like to recommend to you several representatives of public organizations whose service on this commission could be useful. It seems to me that it would be good to include on the commission the chairman of the Antifascist Youth Committee, Hero of the Soviet Union Fedorov; the chairman of the Antifascist Women’s Committee, Hero of the Soviet Union Grizodubova; the chairman of the Antifascist Scholars’ Committee, Academician Derzhavin; the chairman of the Pan-Slav Committee, LieutenantGeneral Gundorov; and the chairman of the Antifascist Jewish Committee, Soviet People’s Artist Mikhoels. In addition, it would also be good to include Academician Kapitsa; the editor of our English-language newspaper The Moscow News, M. Borodin; and the editor of our Jewish newspaper Eynikayt, Epshtein. (The editor of the Polish newspaper New Horizons, Vasil´evskaia, is already on the commission.) I don’t know about the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, Trud, Krasnaia zvezda, and Komsomol´skaia pravda. If they are not included, then it seems we ought to include them. (AVP RF MID RF f. 6 [Molotov’s secretariat], op. 4, d. 69, file 7 [“On the Formation of the Extraordinary State Commission”], l. 33). 58. I do not have concrete archival documents to confirm this conclusion, but it seems to me that the logic of the preparation and passage of the decree on 2 November means that approval for its final form can have been given only by Stalin. 59. See Iurii A. Gor´kov, Gosudarstvennyi Komitet Oborony postanovliaet (1941–1945): Tsifry, dokumenty (Moscow: OLMA-Press, 2002), 332. 60. The decree was published in Pravda on 4 November 1942 and in Vedomosti Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR on 7 November. 61. I might note that Zhdanov took almost no real part in the work of the Extraordinary State Commission. A letter to I. P. Trainin is the source of the quotation used as the heading for this section (ARAN f. 586 [I. P. Trainin], op. 4, d. 32, l. 1). 62. The age range of the commission members spanned 35 years: the oldest, Tarle, was born in 1875 and the youngest, Grizodubova, in 1910. 63. The time had come for the loyal (and reliably bland) functionary Shvernik, who, having survived the political purges of the 1930s, began at age 50 his rise to the highest levels of government (first deputy chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR in 1944–46). During the last seven years of Stalin’s rule (1946–53) he formally became the highestranking person in the state as head of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. 64. See Uchenye zapiski Iur´evskogo universiteta, no. 3 (1912): 1–39, for a special protocol on Burdenko’s selection as a candidate in the Department of Surgery and Topographical Anatomy, prepared at the request of Professor P. A. Poliakov at the 30 November 1910 session of the council. 65. Evidently his former military and revolutionary ties played a crucial role in this. Thus Burdenko’s biographer notes obscurely that after his arrival in Moscow Burdenko “got in touch” with the Institute of Biochemistry of the old revolutionary Aleksei N. Bakh, and with the laboratory of Boris I. Zbarskii—that is, with the Mausoleum of V. I.

notes to pages 133–135 243 Lenin. See Suren M. Bagdasar´ian, Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko (Moscow: Meditsina, 1967), 173–200. (The first edition of this biography appeared in 1948.) In these years Burdenko was a permanent consultant on field surgery for the Red Army’s Main Military Medical Administration. All the same, the Moscow period of his life is rather poorly known. Some light might be shed on it by his lichnyi fond, located in the collections of the Military Medical Museum of the Ministry of Defense in St. Petersburg. On Burdenko’s family life, see the memoirs of a famous Soviet playwright: Aleksandr I. Shtein, I ne tol´ko o nem . . . Povest´ (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1990), 173–84. 66. Bagdasar´ian, Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko, 61–62. It is interesting that in this study, which remains to this day the only detailed biography of Burdenko (although it was published in various editions), almost nothing is said about his activity on the Extraordinary State Commission, although the book’s author accompanied Academician Burdenko throughout the war. Falling squarely into the genre of Soviet hagiography, the book contains much information about Burdenko’s poor health in the 1940s, which, in the author’s opinion, only underlined the academician’s courage and heroism. This information has long been accepted and used by medical historians. See, for example, Boris Sh. Nuvakhov and Boris M. Cheknev, Prezidenty meditsinskoi nauki (Moscow: N.p., 1998), 13, 16, 37; Valentin I. Pokrovskii and Cheknev, “Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko—osnovatel´ i pervyi prezident Akademii meditsinskikh nauk,” Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii meditsinskikh nauk, no. 7 (2002): 47–52; and Iurii L. Shevchenko, “Nikolai Burdenko,” in Rossiiskaia nauka v litsakh, vol. 3 (Moscow: Academia, 2004), also found in Vestnik RAN, no. 3 (2001). On the role of Burdenko in the Katyn falsification, see Boris Ol´shanskii, “Katyn´ (pis´mo v redaktsiiu),” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 6 (1950): 114; and Vladimir Pozdniakov, “Novoe o Katyni,” Novyi zhurnal, no. 104 (1971): 262–80. 67. In the postwar years, she directed the Scientific Research Test-Flight Institute. See also Reina Pennington, Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001). 68. So it was that on 6 January 1946 G. F. Aleksandrov wrote to Molotov and Malenkov in connection with elections for membership on the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, “Academician Trainin is not a great scholar, but he is the most appropriate of the potential candidates” (RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 246, l. 118). 69. It is hardly possible to agree with the opinion that Trainin was an “authoritative scholar” who could be considered one of those “dinosaurs of romantic prerevolutionary Bolshevism, unskilled in the casuistry and rhetoric of the party apparatus” (Gennadii V. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast´ i antisemitizm [Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2001], 575). On the contrary, it is more likely that he owed his surprising career entirely to a keen understanding of how to conduct himself around Stalin. 70. See Boris S. Kaganovich, Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle i peterburgskaia shkola istorikov (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1995); Kaganovich, “E. V. Tarle v Kommissii po voprosam mirnykh dogovorov i poslevoennogo ustroistva, 1943–1945 gg.,” in Problemy vsemirnoi istorii: Sbornik v chest´ akademika A. A. Fursenko, ed. Boris V. Anan´ich et al. (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2000), 351–61. 71. See Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, trans. I. Michael Lerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); and Valerii Soifer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 72. See Anna M. Kriukova, “A. N. Tolstoi—akademik AN SSSR,” in A. N. Tolstoi: Materialy i issledovaniia, ed. Kriukova (Moscow: Nauka, 1985), 231–40; Galina P. Trefilova,

244  notes to pages 135–137 ed., “Iz knizhek A. N. Tolstogo voennykh let,” in ibid., 417–46; and Iurii A. Krestinskii, “Khronika zhizni i tvorchestva A. N. Tolstogo v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 gg.,” in Tvorchestvo A. N. Tolstogo: Sbornik statei, ed. A. V. Alpatova and L. M. Poliak (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1957). 73. Mikhail V. Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov´ i Sovetskoe gosudarstvo v 1943–1964 gg.: Ot “peremiria” k novoi voine (St. Petersburg: Izdatel´skoe ob˝edinenie DEAN and ADIA-M, 1995), 197. From 1946 to 1960, Metropolitan Nikolai headed the Patriarchate’s Department of Relations with Other Churches. He died in Moscow on 13 December 1961, under unexplained circumstances. 74. By decree of the State Committee on Defense, on 16 July 1941, Shvernik was named chairman of the Council (later “Commission”) on Evacuation. See Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 7 (1990): 213. His deputies were A. N. Kosygin and M. G. Perbukhin; and other members of the council were Anastas Ivanovich Mikoian, Lazar´ Moiseevich Kaganovich, Maksim Zakharovich Saburov, and Viktor Semenovich Abakumov (NKVD). 75. GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 6, l. 8. 76. Ibid., d. 17, ll. 4–6. On the activities of the Bureau of Experts, see Zinich, Pokhishchennye sokrovishcha, 61–66. See also my own “Bor´ba za resursy: Priobreteniia i poteri sovetskoi nauki v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny,” in a forthcoming collection of articles devoted to the 275th anniversary of the foundation of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 77. For more detail, see my “Svideteli Niurnberga: Ot ankety k biografii,” in Pravo na imia: Biografiia kak paradigma istoricheskogo protsessa. Vtorye chteniia pamiati V. Ioffe. Sbornik dokladov (St. Petersburg: NITC Memorial, 2005), 50–63. 78. The local commissions were created according to a decree of the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars, no. 299 (“On the Work of the Extraordinary State Commission”), dated 16 March 1943, and personally signed by Stalin. Attached to this document was the decree on the Extraordinary State Commission. Other decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR that regulated the activity of the Extraordinary State Commission were signed by Molotov. 79. GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 1a, ll. 1, 13–16. 80. GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 5v, l. 16; and ibid., d. 5a, ll. 53–55, 84–86. 81. G. M. Adibekov and K. M. Anderson, eds., Politbiuro TsK RKP(b)–VKP(b): Povestki dnia zasedanii, 1919–1952. Katalog, 3 vols. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001), 3:292 (point 341). 82. GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 1a, l. 12; and ibid., l. 5. 83. The restoration of control over the liberated territories is a separate topic of research. German propaganda in many of the occupied regions of the USSR had borne substantial fruit. Here a sizable police force had been created out of the local population; Soviet citizens, especially young people, had formed armed bands; and various industrial, agricultural, scholarly, and cultural institutions were in operation. Moreover, from the beginning of the war, information began to trickle into Moscow about various sorts of Nazi “dramatizations” of “Bolshevik” atrocities. These had a strong emotional and psychological impact on the local population, which remembered all too well the horrors of famine, socialist collectivization, and incessant repression. I might add that the creation of SMERSH and the issuing of the famous decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 19 April 1943 (“On Measures of Punishment for German-Fascist Criminals Who Are Guilty of the Murder and Torture of Soviet Citizens and Red Army Prisoners of War and for Soviet Citizens Who Are Spies and Traitors to the Motherland and for Their

notes to pages 137–139 245 Accomplices”) along with the activation of Extraordinary State Commission investigations, were all undoubtedly links in one chain that were intended in part—and perhaps even principally—to help instill “order” in the liberated Soviet territories. 84. See, for instance, the description, quite expressive in its bitter veracity, of the process of compiling the testimonies of German atrocities that was given by the writer Nikolai Atarov not long after he had visited some of the newly liberated areas: In those days, in the midst of everyday activities—digging through the ashes of huge conflagrations, searching for a place to spend the night or a passing car—everywhere people were seized with the spontaneous need to write, to testify. Stacks upon stacks of testimonies piled up in the political sections of regiments and divisions. They were written on scraps of Gestapo forms, on the backs of idiotic Goebbels posters, and more frequently in school notebooks. There is no statute of limitations for what was written in them. These statements were composed the hour after the taking of a city or village. The commission was selected sometimes while still under enemy artillery fire. Its members were chosen thoughtfully: soldiers with military awards and medals; teachers and elderly priests; party and Soviet workers who had just returned from the army; nurses and honest old women. Appointment to the commission was itself an honor, like the trust of widows, orphans, and those who have lost their homes to fire. I knew many of the commission members. It was all the same: the expert in forensic medicine or the old collective farmer, they were all stark indicators of the people’s calamity, sullenly anxious about how the unrest in their spirits might misrepresent not so much the fact as the form of their accounts, as these had been recorded for such documents. But “the undersigned” are real live people! Despair drew them out of their powerlessness to describe what they had seen and experienced. Figures seemed incomplete and dry, facts seemed bloodless and dead. They stood on top of the excavated mass graves. It began to seem to them that if they named only facts and figures, they would be hiding something. . . . They would be hiding both the terrible and the simple, which cannot creep into any document. Nikolai Sergeevich Atarov, “Panshin voinu ob˝iasniaet,” in Voennaia publitsistika i frontovye ocherki, ed. Aleksandr Krivitskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966), 445–46. 85. GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 5v, l. 88. 86. Drafts of the reports were also sent to Shcherbakov for his information. This system differed from that put forward by Lev Bezymenskii. See Bezymenskii, “Informatsiia po-sovetski,” 192–93. 87. The Politburo named Vyshinskii chairman of the Commission for Leading the Work of Soviet Representatives at the International Tribunal in Nuremberg. See Iurii Zoria, “Niurnbergskaia missiia,” in Inkvizitor: Stalinskii prokuror Vyshinskii, ed. Oleg E. Kutafin (Moscow: Respublika, 1992). 88. GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 152, l. 44. 89. Ibid., d. 84, l. 1. 90. Ibid., d. 65, l. 3. 91. Ibid., l. 18. 92. RGASPI f. 82 (Molotov), op. 2, d. 512, l. 11. 93. Ibid., ll. 12–38.

246  notes to pages 139–141 94. I would add that in contrast to the study of the history of German medicine and its disciplinary communities under Hitler’s rule—see, for instance, Michael H. Kater, Doctors under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), which contains an extensive bibliography—the role of Soviet experts in forensic medicine during the war, including as part of the Extraordinary State Commission, has been largely ignored and deserves its own special, detailed treatment. Among the exceptions, see Evgenii K. Krasnushkin, “Sudebno-meditsinskaia ekspertiza na Niurnbergskom protsesse,” Vrachebnoe delo, no. 9 (1946): 631–40; and Viktor V. Kolkutin, Aleksei M. Avdeev, Iurii I. Sosedko, and Eduard N. Ermolenko, Mikhail Ivanovich Avdeev: Vydaiushchiisia uchenyi i organizator sudebno-meditsinskoi ekspertizy (Moscow: Meditsina dlia vsekh, 2001). Among more general works, neither Sergei V. Shershavkin’s older study Istoriia otechestvennoi sudebnomeditsinskoi sluzhby (Moscow: Meditsina, 1968) nor newer studies such as Rafail S. Belkin’s Istoriia otechestvennoi kriminalistiki (Moscow: Norma, 1999) or Anatolii A. and Iurii A. Solokhin’s Sudebno-meditsinskaia nauka v Rossii i SSSR v XIX i XX stoletiiakh (Moscow: N.p., 1998) mention this dimension of Soviet forensic medical doctors’ activity during World War II. For the role of Extraordinary State Commission experts during the war, see my “Operatsiia ‘Umelye liudi,’ ili chto uvidel akademik Burdenko v Orle,” in In Memoriam: Sbornik pamiati Vladimira Alloia (St. Petersburg: Feniks; Paris: Athenaeum, 2005), 361–89. For the role of Allied doctors, see Paul J. Weindling, “Tales from Nuremberg”: The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Allied Medical War Crimes Policy (Berlin: Wallstein, 2000); and Weindling, Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 95. RGASPI f. 82 (Molotov), op. 2, d. 512, l. 33. 96. Ibid., ll. 33–34. 97. Sbornik soobshchenii Chrezvychainoi gosudarstvennoi komissii o zlodeianiiakh nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1946), 33. The party organization of Stavropol krai was then headed by Mikhail Andreevich Suslov, who became the chief party ideologue during the Brezhnev era. 98. Ibid., 33, 35, 37, and passim. 99. For stenographic reports of these meetings, see GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 136. 100. Ibid., l. 9. 101. Ibid., ll. 9–10. 102. GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 136, l. 17. It is interesting that at these meetings the only member of the Extraordinary State Commission who brought up the need for a personal tally of Nazi victims was Lysenko. 103. Thus, the editor-in-chief of Krasnaia zvezda, David Iosifovich Ortenberg, recalls the strong displeasure on the part of Head of the Sovinformbiuro and Secretary of the Central Committee Shcherbakov with the newspaper’s publication in autumn 1941 of an article by Aleksei Tolstoi entitled “The Blood of the People,” in which he devoted much space to the sacrifices made by the people. “Why now make so much noise about the fact that we ourselves blew up hydroelectric stations?!” Shcherbakov shouted. See Ortenberg, Stalin, Shcherbakov, Mekhlis, i drugie (Moscow: MP Kodeks, 1995), 102–3. At the same time, the postwar years saw the publication in the USSR of a number of memoirs, written in the genre of the heroic saga by local soviet and party figures who had participated firsthand in fulfilling Stalin’s directive. These memoirs contain many examples of the destruction of industrial and agricultural enterprises before the arrival of the enemy. See,

notes to pages 141–143 247 for instance, the memoirs of the director of one of the operational sections of the NKVD border administration: A. Beschastnov, “Chekisty protiv ‘Edel´veisa,’” in Razorvannyi krug: Ocherki i vospominaniia o chekistakh Kubani (Krasnodar: Krasnodarskoe knizhnoe izdatel´stvo, 1982), 178–207. 104. To obtain a better count of the number of victims in the Leningrad blockade, different from the official figures, even First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Party Committee A. A. Zhdanov was forced in 1944 to create a special “shadow” auxiliary commission for the city. To this day, however, no researcher has been able to gain access to the report it prepared. See Viktor Demidov, ed., Blokada rassekrechennaia (St. Petersburg: Boianych, 1995), 227. 105. It is interesting that this action was taken in parallel to the arrest of the former director of SMERSH, Minister of State Security Viktor S. Abakumov. 106. A press conference for Soviet and Western journalists on this matter was held on 5 April 1960. See Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia po ustanovleniiu i rassledovaniiu zlodeianii nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov i ikh soobshchnikov, Krovavye zlodeianiia Oberlendera: Otchet o press-konferentsii dlia sovetskikh i inostrannykh zhurnalistov, sostoiavsheisia v Moskve 5 aprelia 1960 goda (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo literatury na inostrannykh iazykakh, 1961); Vladimir Abarinov, Katynskii labirint (Moscow: Novosti, 1991), 193–94; and GARF f. R–7021, op. 116, d. 390.

Chapter 7. An Analysis of Soviet Postwar Investigation and Trial Documents and Their Relevance for Holocaust Studies 1. Bessarabia is the historical name of the region between the Dniester and Prut rivers and is conventionally used to refer to the area under the rule of tsarist Russia (1812–1918) or Romania (1918–40, 1941–44). Moldova is conventionally used today to describe the same territory (with some changes on the northern, southern, and eastern borders) when it was pseudoindependent as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR, inside the Soviet Union) or to refer to the contemporary Republic of Moldova. 2. I do not use “Bessarabian” as an ethnic identification but to describe the local population of Bessarabia as a whole. In earlier times (and occasionally even today), “Bessarabian” was used interchangeably with “Romanian” and “Moldovan” in referring to the Romanian-speaking population of Bessarabia. In 1930, the Romanian/Moldovan ethnic group included 56.2 percent of Bessarabia’s population. At the same time, the residents of Bessarabia included 10.9 percent Ukrainians, 12.2 percent Russians, 7.1 percent Jews, 5.7 percent Bulgarians, 3.4 Gagauz, and 2.8 percent Germans. 3. USHMM RG-54.003*27, War Crimes Investigation and Trial Records from the Republic of Moldova, 1944–55, Record of the Case of Petr (Petru) Ghrigorievici Lupan (Lupanu), 114. 4. Ibid. 5. See Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott, eds., Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 6. See Nicolas Werth, “Repenser la Grande Terreur,” Le Débat 122 (November–December 2002): 116–43.

248  notes to pages 143–146 7. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 8. Tanja Penter, “Collaboration on Trial: New Source Material on Soviet Postwar Trials against Collaborators,” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (2005): 782–90. 9. Penter cites data from the Russian Federal Security Service, which announced that from 1943 to 1953 more than 320,000 Soviet citizens were arrested for collaboration with the Nazis (ibid., 783). 10. For an overview of current debates, see Martin Dean, “Local Collaboration in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 120–40. 11. Yitzhak Arad, “The Local Population in the German-Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union and Its Attitude toward the Murder of the Jews,” in Nazi Europe and the Final Solution, ed. D. Bankier and I. Gutman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003); David Gaunt, Paul A. Levine, and Laura Palosuo, Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004); Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, “Introduction,” in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Brandon and Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); and Vladimir Solonari’s chapter in this book. On the role of local auxiliary police see Vincas Bartusevicius, Joachim Tauber, and Wolfram Wette, Holocaust in Litauen: Krieg, Judenmorde und Kollaboration im Jahre 1941 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003); Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); and Knut Stang, Kollaboration und Massenmord: Die litauische Hilfspolizei, das Rollkommando Hamann und die Ermordung der litauischen Juden (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996). On reports about the Holocaust in the Soviet media during World War II, see Karel Berkhoff’s chapter in this book. 12. Penter, “Collaboration on Trial,” 782–90. 13. Ibid., 784. 14. Ibid., 784. 15. Ibid., 785. 16. Ibid., 785. 17. Ibid., 785. 18. These are former NKVD/KGB files inherited by the Moldovan Security Service. The former president, Vladimir Voronin, decided to transmit copies of files on the Holocaust from the domestic Security Service (SIS) to the USHMM. As a result, in December 2003, 61 files containing copies of investigations and trial records of crimes, mostly committed against Jews during World War II, were transmitted to the USHMM and are available in RG-54.003, “War Crimes Investigation and Trial Records from the Republic of Moldova.” I researched these files during nine months at the USHMM’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies as a Rosenzweig Family Fellow. We know that in 2012 the Moldovan secret services released about 70 more dossiers to the USHMM, but we do not know how many files are still kept in the SIS archives. 19. The project has been ongoing in other European countries, too—including the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine, Serbia, Hungary, and Bosnia. 20. The latest file is dated 1957, but most come from 1944–46.

notes to pages 146–151 249 21. USHMM RG-54.003*12, Record of the Case of Constantin Eni (Ene), 47–48. 22. USHMM RG-50.572, Moldova Documentation Project, Interview with Evghenii Televca (2008). See also USHMM RG-54.003*24, Record of the Case of Vasilii Kordelian, 102–3. 23. Ibid. 24. The defendants were Dumitru Gonța, Trifon Nemerenco, Vasile Lupan, Alexandru Ene, and Neculai Teleuca. All these names appear in a list contained in the file of Alexandru Ene. See USHMM RG-54.003*47, Record of the Case of Alexandru Konstantinovici Sirbu-Eni (Sârbu-Ene). 25. USHMM RG-54.003*37, Record of the Case of Andrei Evghenievici Racu; USHMM RG-54.003*46, Record of the Case of Efim Stratu. 26. SMERSH units operated in 1943–46. They were charged with arresting traitors, deserters, spies, collaborators, saboteurs, and other criminal elements at the rear and the front of the Soviet army and with “filtering” Soviet prisoners of war who returned home. For more information, see A. Sever, “Smert´ shpionam!” Voennaia kontrrazvedka SMERSH v gody Velikoi otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Iauza Eksmo, 2009). 27. USHMM RG-54.003*46, Record of the Case of Efim Stratu. See also the depositions of Grigorii Țopa, ibid., 30–31. 28. USHMM RG-54.003*37, Record of the Case of Andrei Evghenievici Racu, 7, 10. 29. Interview with Bronislava Voițițkaia, Ceres, Storojinetz district (Ukraine), April 2011. A villager denounced Bronislava’s father for “demolishing a bust of Stalin.” The man was severely beaten both during his arrest (while the entire family watched) and in police custody. Bronislava remembers her father returning home several years later, completely bald and frail after his incarceration. 30. USHMM RG-50.572, Oral History, Moldova, Interview with Mihail Cărăuş (2008). 31. USHMM RG-50.572, Interview with Fiodor Rotaru (2008). 32. USHMM RG-50.572, Interview with Mihail Cărăuş (2008). 33. USHMM RG-54.003*46, Record of the Case of Efim Stratu, 31. Anton Racu may not have been put on trial; perpetrators often escaped to Romania or other parts of the USSR or died during World War II. Another possibility is that Anton Racu’s file is still locked inside the archives of the secret services in Chișinău. 34. USHMM RG-50.572, Interview with Fiodor Rotaru (2008). 35. USHMM RG-54.003*40, Record of the Case of Ivan Sadovei, 16. 36. USHMM RG-54.003*40, Record of the Case of Ivan Sadovei. 37. USHMM RG-50.572, Interview with Andrei Vulpe (2008). 38. Penter, “Collaboration on Trial,” 783. 39. For example, Nikita Petrov gives a detailed description of the abuses and illegalities committed in 1952–53 by Soviet policemen, in response to direct orders from Stalin, in reference to the Doctors’ Plot. See Nikita Petrov, “Zavety Stalina: ‘Bit´, bit´, smertnym boem bit´!’” Novaia gazeta, 22 August 2011. 40. USHMM RG-54.003*47, Record of the case of Alexandru Konstantinovici Sirbu-Eni (Sârbu-Ene). 41. Fiodor Şchiopu later explained to the KGB officer that he could not go to the district office, since he had suffered leg injuries during the war and no public transportation connected his village to the district town. 42. USHMM RG-50.572, Interview with Fiodor Şchiopu (2009). 43. Şchiopu mentioned this episode to me in 2009 during a discussion.

250  notes to pages 151–154 44. The neighbors of the Jewish family told the investigator that Povaliuk several times visited the couple and forced them to dance, to perform a sexual act, then brought a rope and tried to force his victims to hang themselves. Ultimately, Povaliuk killed the old man, and the old woman was found hanged in her house. See the testimony of Josan Agafia in RG-54.003*36, Record of the Case of Povaliuk Semen Stepanovici, 209–16. 45. USHMM RG-54.003*41, Record of the Case of Petr Konstantinovici Sanduliak (Sanduleac) and Ivan (Ion) Konstantinovici Sanduliak (Sanduleac). 46. See the court decisions from November 1944 in USHMM RG-54.003*45, Record of the Case of Gheorghii Sokolenko. 47. On the NKVD and party equilibrium, see Oleg Khlevniuk, “Party and NKVD: Power Relationships in the Years of the Great Terror,” in Stalin’s Terror, ed. Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 48. See Penter, “Collaboration on Trial”; Jeffrey W. Jones, “‘Every Family Has Its Freak’: Perceptions of Collaboration in Occupied Soviet Russia, 1943–1948,” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (2005): 747–70; Martin Dean, “Where Did All the Collaborators Go?” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (2005): 791–98; and Marina Sorokina’s chapter in the present book. 49. See, for example, the files of Timofei Gheorghilaș dating from the autumn of 1951, Vasilii Kordelian from 1952, Alexandru Sirbu-Eni (Sârbu-Ene) from 1949, and Evgheni Jdanov from 1949, among others. For more on anti-Jewish policies in the USSR in this period, see Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. 50. RG-54.003*42, Record of the Case of Pavel Serghienco, 111–13. 51. There was also a lot of the Stalinist phraseology typical of any Soviet document from that period. The language of the accusations is sprinkled with such idioms as “counterrevolutionary,” “fascist,” and “road of betrayal” (see, e.g., RG-54.003*46, Record of the Case of Efim Stratu, 120, or RG-54.003*46, Record of the Case of Ignat Andreevici Ceban, 70), echoing Soviet political jargon of the 1930s. 52. For example, the interrogator in Sanduleac’s case wrote about the defendant being a member of Apărarea pasivă, a volunteer group charged with maintaining the local order. The phonetic transcription from Romanian—Apparirii pasenvi—contains numerous mistakes. Clearly, the interrogator never heard of this group (RG-54.003*45, Record of the Case of Petr Konstantinovici Sanduleac, 2). 53. RG-54.003*48, Record of the Case of Nicolai Ivanovici Tanasescu (Tănăsescu), 74–75. 54. Ibid., minutes of the interrogations of Tanasescu (Tănăsescu), 8 May 1944. 55. Primarily because the interviewees were very young in the interwar period and were not paying much attention to a villager’s political affiliation. 56. For example, the files revealed that during the war some Bessarabians who enrolled in the Romanian gendarmerie were sent on duty to Transnistria, as part of what was known as the agrarian gendarmerie (jandarmi agricoli). Their tasks included guarding Jewish camps. Survivors frequently mentioned Moldovans or Ukrainians as guards at Transnistrian camps and ghettoes, usually assuming them all to be natives of the area. These documents indicate that was not always true. Another issue that remains unintelligible in survivors’ testimonies or other oral history accounts is how so many Bessarabian perpetrators obtained weapons. A standard explanation is that Romanian soldiers or gendarmes lent their weapons to civilians, and this did sometimes happen. But the postwar investigations indicate that the locals often used guns brought into the village by deserters from the Soviet army. For example, a resident of Ghincăuți mentioned that in June 1941 many of the village residents were recruited into the Soviet army, but when

notes to pages 155–156 251 the army started to withdraw, “all our residents deserted with weapons in hand, and they surrendered these arms to the town hall” (RG-54.003*39, Record of the Case of Serghei Vasilievici Dascal [Dascăl], 25). 57. Roger D. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 58. One relevant case is that of Serghei Dascăl, a native of Ghincăuţi, who in 1940 was sentenced to one year in prison for beating a (female) member of the local soviet. In the summer of 1941, after the bombing of Bălţi, Dascăl escaped from prison and went straight to his village. Even before the new authorities arrived, he attacked the head of the Ghincăuţi council and later contributed to the arrest of other Soviet activists, including an NKVD officer whom he recognized from his time in the Bălţi jail. Together with a group of locals, he also participated in the arrest and killing of local Jews (RG-54.003*39, Record of the Case of Serghei Vasilievici Dascal [Dascăl], 5–6, 20). Vladimir Solonari was first to observe that more vengeance was directed against Christians than against Jews as representatives of Soviet power—see his chapter. 59. Not a single interviewee, from a group of about 200 individuals, addressed this topic. 60. USHMM RG-54.003*40, Record of the Case of Ivan Sadovei, 15. 61. USHMM RG-54.003*48, Record of the Case of Tanasescu (Tănăsescu) Nicolai Ivanovici, minutes of the interrogation of Vasilii Stepanovici Mateesco, 26 May 1944. 62. Solonari states that the “corruption was central to the economy of mass killing” and in order “to enlist such cooperation, to motivate killers, the Romanian military and gendarmes more often than not resorted to the surest and simplest means: bribery” (see his chapter). 63. USHMM RG-50.572, Interview with Vasile Morei (2008); USHMM RG-50.572, Interview with Nicolae Bersan (2008); USHMM RG-50.572, Video Interview with Liuba Filipciuc (2008); Matatiaș Carp, Cartea neagră, 2nd ed. (Bucharest: Diogene, 1996), 3:40. In 1946–48, Matatiaş Carp, the Romanian Jewish community leader published a detailed account of the Holocaust in Romania. He was the first one to write about local Bessarabians carrying out robberies and deadly assaults on Jewish convoys. Carp wrote about local peasants paying the gendarmes money for well-dressed Jews. After the “deal,” the gendarmes would shoot the victims and hand them to the robbers (Carp, Cartea neagră, 2nd ed., 3:40). 64. For example, this was the declaration of Mikhail Gorpatii, see USHMM RG54.003*22, Record of the Case of Mikhail Kitik (Chitic), 85. Another murderer, who was 23 years old, explained his personal involvement: “When I approached the building of the town hall, where the Jews were locked up, I saw that many of the local residents were killing Jews with alacrity. Seeing this, I immediately started to kill the Jews who, trying to escape death, were running—some toward the windows, some toward the doors” (USHMM RG-54.003*45, Record of the Case of Gheorghii Sokolenko, 55). 65. USHMM RG-54.003*47, Record of the Case of Alexandru Sirbu-Eni (Sârbu-Ene). The father was seen running through the village, pointing at the houses of Jews and shouting: “Fire! Here is a nest of Communists!” Meanwhile, the son’s feverish murder of a teenage Jewish girl haunted one witness, who later confirmed that the young man was behaving like a “madman.” 66. In his chapter, Vladimir Solonari mentions that, in cases where Romanian authorities recurred to corruption, “the main villains were peasants who were even poorer and

252  notes to pages 156–158 less cultured than other villagers (bedniak, negramotnyi, and malogramotnyi, in Soviet parlance) and, it seems, sometimes widely despised by their fellow villagers.” 67. Altogether, I reviewed 51 files, which listed 82 defendants accused of crimes committed in Bessarabia. Ten dossiers excluded from this analysis (23 defendants) referred to residents of Transnistria who were tried for holding administrative or policing positions in Jewish ghettoes of Transnistria: Obodovka, Domanevka, Rybnitsa, and Dubossary. Ten defendants in this latter group were of Jewish nationality (served in the Jewish Ghetto Police), followed by seven Ukrainians, three Russians, one Moldovan, one German, and one Italian. On average, the social status and educational level of the Transnistrian defendants was somewhat higher than the Bessarabians.’ The Transnistrians included an engineer, an accountant, a musician, an agronomist, several mayors of town halls, and a number of workers. 68. The “other” category included “peasant” (without specifying a level), “worker,” “working on his farm,” and more. 69. Charles King, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 36.

Chapter 8. A Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust in the Soviet West as an Anti-Site of Memory A significant part of the research for this article was made possible by a grant from and stay at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, which I gratefully acknowledge. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their criticism and comments as well as the hosts and members of Yale University’s Russian and East European History Reading Group for letting me present an earlier version of this article in a setting of helpful criticism and great hospitality. 1. The term “Holocaust” was not used in Soviet literature until the late 1980s, as Zvi Gitelman points out in “Internationalism, Patriotism, and Disillusion: Soviet Jewish Veterans Remember World War II and the Holocaust,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Symposium Presentations (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2005), 102. In reference to most of the Soviet period (and where not indicated otherwise), this chapter uses the term to refer to the phenomenon itself, not to Soviet usage. 2. With special reference to Ukraine, see Andriy Portnov, “Die ukrainische Nationsbildung in der postsowjetischen Historiographie: Einige Beobachtungen,” in Die Ukraine: Prozesse der Nationsbildung, ed. Andreas Kappeler (Cologne: Böhlau, 2011), 29–36; Portnov, “Ukrainskie obrazy Vtoroi mirovoi voiny,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia, no. 2 (2011): 86–92; Portnov, “Post-Soviet Ukraine Dealing with Its Controversial Past,” Journal of Modern European History 8, no. 2 (2010): 152–55, and Portnov, “Der Preis des Sieges: Der Krieg und die Konkurrenz der Veteranen in der Ukraine,” Osteuropa 60, no. 5 (2010): 27–41 (with Tetyana Portnova). More generally, see Stefan Troebst, “Jalta versus Stalingrad, GULag versus Holocaust: Konfligierende Erinnerungskulturen im größeren Europa,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie 15, no. 3 (2005): 381–400; Stefan Rohdewald, “Post-Soviet Remembrance of the Holocaust and National Memories of the Second World War in Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 44, no. 2

notes to pages 158–160 253 (2008): 173–84; and Omer Bartov, “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,” Journal of Modern History 80, no. 3 (2008): 557–93. 3. With special reference to the parts of western Ukraine that used to be eastern Galicia, see Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). See also the reviews of the Ukrainian edition and Bartov’s response in Ukraina moderna, no. 4 (2009). Other useful works include John-Paul Himka, “Debates in Ukraine over Nationalist Involvement in the Holocaust, 2004–2008,” Nationalities Paper, no. 39 (2011); Per Anders Rudling, “Historical Representation of the Wartime Activities of the OUN-UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—Ukrainian Insurgent Army),” East European Jewish Affairs 36, no. 2 (2006): 163–89; and Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths,” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 2107 (2011). 4. For these concepts, partly correct but misleading when applied in a reductionist manner, see Maria Mälksoo, “The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe,” European Journal of International Relations 15, no. 4 (2009): 658. 5. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 6. Rohdewald, “Post-Soviet Remembrance,” 178–80. 7. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Paweł Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak, Wokół Jedwabnego (Warsaw: Instytut pamięci narodowej, 2002); and Marci Shore’s chapter in this book. 8. For an example of the specific effects (and limits) of West European intervention inside the EU expansion area, see Bella Zisere, “The Memory of the Shoah in Post-Soviet Latvia,” East European Jewish Affairs 35, no. 2 (2005): 157. For an emphasis on resistance to the imposition of western European memory regimes, see Mälksoo, “Memory Politics.” 9. Bartov, “Eastern Europe,” 566; Benoît Challand, “1989, Contested Memories, and the Shifting Cognitive Maps of Europe,” European Journal of Social Theory 12, no. 2 (2009): 399. 10. Timothy Snyder, “The Ethical Significance of Eastern Europe, Twenty Years On,” East European Politics and Society 23, no. 4 (2009): 459. 11. Yaroslav Hrytsak, “The War and the Holocaust in the Collective Memory of Jews, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians” (paper presented at a conference at Ben-Gurion University, 17–25 May 1998) as summarized in Bartov, Erased, 89. 12. John-Paul Himka, “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 53, nos. 2–4 (2011): 209–43; Wendy Lower, “Pogroms, Mob Violence, and Genocide in Western Ukraine, Summer 1941: Varied Histories, Explanations and Comparisons,” Journal of Genocide Research 13, no. 3 (2011): 217–46. Bartov has made the same point with regard to Eastern Europe in general (“Eastern Europe,” 570). 13. See, for instance, the examples of Nina Soboleva and Stepan Podlubny in Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 104, 216.

254  notes to pages 162–163 14. For the concept of “negative integration,” see Steven Beller, “The City as Integrator: Immigration, Education and Popular Culture in Vienna, 1880–1938,” German Politics and Society 15, no. 1 (1997): 128. 15. Yaroslav Hrytsak, “Lviv: A Multicultural History through the Centuries,” in Lviv: A City in the Crosscurrents of Culture, ed. John Czaplicka (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 47–73. 16. State Committee on Statistics of Ukraine (www.ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/results/ general/nationality/Lviv, accessed 28 April 2009). 17. Tomasz Stryjek, Jakiei przeszłości potrzebuje Przyszłość? Interpretacje dziejów

narodowych w historiografii I debacie publicznej na Ukrainie, 1991–2004

(Warsaw: RYTM, 2007); Andrij Portnov, “Pluralität der Erinnerung: Denkmäler und Geschichtspolitik in der Ukraine,” Osteuropa 58, no. 6 (2008): 197–210; Wilfried Jilge, “Nationalukrainischer Befreiungskampf: Die Umwertung des Zweiten Weltkrieges in der Ukraine,” Osteuropa 58, no. 6 (2008): 167; Rohdewald, “Post-Soviet Remembrance,” 176ff; Jutta Scherrer, “Ukraine: Konkurrierende Erinnerungen,” in Mythen der Nationen: 1945— Arena der Erinnerungen, ed. Monika Flacke (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2004), 723. 18. Zvi Gitelman, “Soviet Reactions to the Holocaust, 1945–1991,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 8; and Gitelman, “Internationalism, Patriotism, and Disillusion,” 102. For a survey of western literature on the Soviet treatment of the Holocaust, see Karel C. Berkhoff’s chapter. On the Holocaust in Ukraine, some of the most important contributions include Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, eds., The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). On the Holocaust in Lviv and western Ukraine/eastern Galicia (not exactly the same but overlapping areas): Eliyahu Jones [Eliyahu Yonas], Żydzi Lwowa w okresie okupacji 1939–1945 (Łodź: Oficyna bibliofilów, 1999); Eliyahu Yonas, Die Straße nach Lemberg: Zwangsarbeit und Widerstand in Ostgalizien 1941–1944 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1999); Thomas Sandkühler, “Endlösung” in Galizien: der Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berthold Beitz 1941–1944 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996); Christoph Mick, “Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and German Occupation, 1939–1944,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 2 (2011): 336–63; Mick, Kriegserfahrungen in einer multiethnischen Stadt: Lemberg 1914–1947 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010); and Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944: Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (München: Oldenbourg, 1996). Important memoirs include Samuel Drix, Witness to Annihilation: Surviving the Holocaust. A Memoir (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1994); Jacob Maltiel-Gerstenfeld, My Private War: One Man’s Struggle to Survive the Soviets and the Nazis (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1993); Kurt I. Lewin, Przeżylem: Saga Świętego Jura spisana w roku 1946 przez syna rabina Lwowa, ed. Barbara Toruńczyk, comments by Andrzej Żbikowski (Warsaw: Fundacja zeszytów literackich, 2006); and Leon W[eliczker] Wells, Ein Sohn Hiobs (Munich: Heyne, 1963). See also the pertinent parts of Stanisław Lem, Świat na krawędzi: Ze Stanisławem Lemem rozmawia Tomasz Fiałkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo literackie, 2000); and Yevhen Nakonechny, “Shoa” u

notes to pages 163–166 255 Lvovi: Spohady (Lviv: Naukova biblioteka im. V. Stefanyka, 2004)—important but to be used with special caution; and Himka, “Debates in Ukraine,” 354–56. 19. Gitelman, “Internationalism, Patriotism, and Disillusion,” 103. 20. Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 209–35. 21. Zisere, “Memory,” 156; Mälksoo, “Memory Politics.” 22. On Jews punished for participation in the Judenrat, see Tanja Penter, “Collaboration on Trial: New Source Material on Soviet Postwar Trials against Collaborators,” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (2005): 784. For Jewish survivors sent to Gulag camps because of alleged collaboration with the Germans, see Ilya Altman and Claudio Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste, 1933–2001,” in Vassili [Vasilii] Petrenko, Avant et après Auschwitz, trans. François-Xavier Nérard (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 279. 23. Penter, “Collaboration,” 785–89. 24. Soviet estimates put the number of victims murdered directly at the camp at about 200,000. The real figure was lower, if still high, estimated by Pohl at 35,000–40,000 (Judenverfolgung, 338). See also Grzegorz Hryciuk, Przemiany narodowościowe i ludniościowe w Galicji Wschodniej i na Wołyniu w latach 1931–1948 (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2005), 213 n. 43. The fact that fewer Holocaust victims were killed directly in the Yanivska camp than initially estimated made no difference to the total number of victims from Lviv or, in general, the Distrikt Galizien. It meant only that more of them died not in the Yanivska camp but in other places, mostly either in Aktionen and local mass shootings or after deportation to the Belzec death camp. 25. Nakonechny, “Shoa,” u Lvovi, 219, 222. 26. Pohl, Judenverfolgung, 335. 27. Vil´na Ukraina, 19 August 1944, 2. 28. Vil´na Ukraina, 25 August 1944, 3. 29. Vil´na Ukraina, 28 October 1944, 7. 30. Pravda, 23 December 1944, 2; Vil´na Ukraina, 29 December 1944, 1. 31. Pravda, 23 December 1944, 2; Vil´na Ukraina, 29 December 1944, 1. The article mentioned more than 140,000 victims executed by the Germans in the Lysynychi Forest but did not include the forest in its list of sites where ghetto inmates had been murdered. Instead, it emphasized Soviet POWs as victims at Lysynychi. Like Beliaev’s earlier piece on the “secrets” of Yanivska, the Pravda article claimed that the site resembled Katyn— according to Soviet propaganda the site of German, not Soviet, mass killings of Polish officers. Thus, Pravda and Beliaev did not only remove the Jewish victims from Lysynychi but also inscribed the site in a key Soviet lie, one designed to conceal Soviet crimes against Polish officers as well as Soviet collusion with Germany during the first 22 months of World War II. 32. Vil´na Ukraina, 29 December 1944, 1, and 5 January 1945, 3. 33. M. Dudykevych et al., eds., Narysy istorii L´vova, 1256–1956 (Lviv: Knizhkovozhurnal´ne vydavnytstvo, 1956), 312. 34. Narysy istorii L´vova, 312. 35. Narysy istorii L´vivskoi oblastnoi partinoi orhanizatsii, 3rd rev. and exp. ed. (Lviv: Kameniar, 1980), 82. 36. Quoted in Sovetskaia Ukraina v gody Velikoi otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945: Dokumenty i materialy (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1985), 3:246–51 (doc. 192). 37. See Karel Berkhoff’s chapter in this volume.

256  notes to pages 166–168 38. Ibid.; Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 247. 39. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 209. 40. Myroslav Shkandrij, Jews in Ukrainian Literature: Representation and Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 173. 41. Himka, “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941”; Lower, “Pogroms, Mob Violence, and Genocide”; Pohl, Judenverfolgung, 59; Philipp-Christian Wachs, Der Fall Theodor Oberländer (1905–1998): Ein Lehrstück deutscher Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2000), 79–81; Ivan Himka [John-Paul Himka], “Dostovirnist svidchennia: Relaiatsiia Ruzi Vagner pro L´vivskii pohrom vlitku 1941 r.,” Holokost i Suchasnist, no. 2 (2008): 43–65. Marco Carynnyk underlines the importance of the concept of “collective responsibility” in “‘Jews, Poles, and Other Scum’: Ruda Różaniecka, Monday, 30 June 1941” (paper presented at the Fourth Annual Danyliw Research Seminar in Contemporary Ukrainian Studies, 23–25 October 2008 [available at www.ukrainianstudies.uottawa.ca/ pdf/P_Danyliw08_Carynnyk.pdf, accessed 2 July 2013]), 22. 42. Quoted in Sovetskaia Ukraina v gody Velikoi otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945, 1:302–4 (doc. 233). The NKVD murdered about 2,500 victims in Lviv’s prisons. See Ia. Isaievych, M. Lytvyn, and F. Stebliy, eds., Istoriia L´vova (Lviv: Tsentr Evropy, 2007), 3:202; Grzegorz Motyka, Ukraińska partyzantka, 1942–1960 (Warsaw: Rytm, 2006), 87; Pohl, Judenverfolgung, 55; and Grzegorz Hryciuk, Polacy we Lwowie 1939–1944: Życie codzienne (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 2000), 186–91 (more detailed, with slightly higher estimates of the number of victims than in the Istoriia or Motyka’s book). 43. The Lviv pogrom was part of a wave of similar assaults from the Baltic to the Black Sea, where Germans and segments of the local population attacked Jews, with dozens of cases identified by researchers (Lower, “Pogroms, Mob Violence, and Genocide,” 218; Motyka, Ukraińska partyzantka, 97; Hryciuk, Przemiany narodowościowe i ludniościowe, 201; Pohl, Judenverfolgung, 58–67; and Mick, “Incompatible Experiences,” 349ff). On the dissemination of Ukrainian nationalist propaganda through placards, leaflets, and instructions, see Marco Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth: Ukrainian Nationalist Discussions about Jews, 1929–1947,” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 3 (2011): 332–45. 44. Snyder, Bloodlands, 227. 45. Motyka, Ukraińska partyzantka. 46. Mick, “Incompatible Experiences,” 355; Mick, Kriegserfahrungen, 521–23. 47. Henry Abramson, “Nachrichten aus Lemberg: Lokale Elemente in der antisemitischen Ikonographie der NS-Propaganda in ukrainischer Sprache,” in Grenzenlose Vorurteile: Antisemitismus, Nationalismus und ethnische Konflikte in verschiedenen Kulturen, ed. Irmtrud Wojak and Susanne Meinl (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002), 250. 48. L´vivski visti, 11 August 1941, 2; 12 August 1941, 1–4; 17/18 August 1941, 1; 19 August 1941, 1; 17 September 1941, 3; and 12/13 October 1941, 3. On L´vivski visti’s visual antisemitic propaganda, see Abramson, “Nachrichten aus Lemberg.” 49. Shkandrij, Jews in Ukrainian Literature, 179, 181. 50. Derzhavnyi arkhiv L´vivskoi oblasti (DALO) f. R-35, op. 9, sp. 184, p. 1; DALO f. R-35, op. 9, sp. 241,11. 6, 29, 41 (USHMM Acc.1995.A.1086, reel 8). 51. DALO f. R-35, op. 9, sp. 127, n.p., “Gouverneur Galizien: Der Beauftragte des Pressechef [sic] der Regierung, Fernschreiben,” Nr. 24; DALO f. R-35, op. 12, sp. 18, p. 95 (USHMM Acc.1995.A.1086, reel 8). 52. Taras Kurylo and Ivan Khymka [John-Paul Himka], “Iak OUN stavylasia do

notes to pages 168–172 257 ievreiv? Rozdumy nad knyzhkoiu Volodymyr Viatrovycha,” Ukraina moderna, no. 13 (2008): 263–64; Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth”; Pohl, Judenverfolgung, 57; Volodymyr Serhiychuk, Ukrainskyi zdvyh, vol. 1: Zakerzonnia, 1939–1947 (Kyiv: Ukrainska vydavnycha spilka, 2004), 116, 124, 127. 53. Himka, “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941,” 222. 54. Ibid., 224. 55. Marco Carynnyk draws the same conclusion from his research into Ukrainian nationalist attitudes toward Jews. Carynnyk has provided more evidence on OUN antisemitism and its pervasiveness and persistence. As John-Paul Himka has recently confirmed, Carynnyk’s “publications of OUN statements” on Jews are “highly authoritative,” based on archival originals. See Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth,” 344; and Himka, “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941,” 224. 56. Volodymyr Serhiychuk, Stepan Bandera: U dokumentakh radianskykh orhaniv derzhavnoi bezpeky (1939–1959) (Kyiv: P. P. Serhiychuk, 2009), 1:154. 57. Ibid., 1:155, 157. 58. Shkandrij, Jews in Ukrainian Literature, 177; Serhiychuk, Ukrainskyi zdvih, 3: Prykarpattia, 1939–1955 (Kyiv: Ukrainska vydavnycha spilka, 2005), 219. Although OUN propagandists may have produced the “Response,” this does not exclude their being part of the UPA. Exaggerating the difference between these inextricably interwoven organizations is not realistic. 59. Serhiychuk, Ukrainskyi zdvih, 3:110. 60. Ibid., 3:182. 61. Before the war, the moderate UNDO party was more important among Ukrainians in Poland than the radical nationalists of the OUN. The combined effects of Soviet and Nazi policy during the war effectively empowered radicals, who were also often fascists, antisemites, and ethnic cleansers of Poles. During and after the war, the radicals managed to control a mass movement. See Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “The ‘Ukrainian National Revolution’ of 1941: Discourse and Practice of a Fascist Movement,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 1 (2011): 83–114. Rossoliński-Liebe shows conclusively that “fascism” is a more precise and historically accurate description of the OUN-B at this point in its history than the traditionally often used “integral nationalism.” 62. Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth,” 345. 63. These two paragraphs draw on Karel Berkhoff’s chapter, which is also the source of the quotations. 64. Marian R. Sanders, “Extraordinary Crimes in Ukraine: An Examination of Evidence Collection by the Extraordinary State Commission of the USSR, 1942–1946” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 1995), 71. See also Marina Sorokina’s chapter for more detail on the Extraordinary State Commission and its work. 65. Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 261. 66. See Karel Berkhoff’s chapter in this volume. 67. DALO f. P-3, op. 1, sp. 278, p. 28 (USHMM Acc. 1995.A.1087). 68. Ibid., p. 41. 69. John Anton Barnet Jr., “The Reaction of the Soviet Press to Nazi Occupation during the Period June 23, 1941, to November 23, 1942” (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1955), 43. 70. DALO f. P-66, op. 1, sp. 5, p. 139. 71. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI) f. 17, op.

258  notes to pages 173–175 125, d. 351, 1. 32; D. Manuilskyi, Ukrainsko-nimetski natsionalisty na sluzhbi u fashistskoi Nimechchyny (Kyiv: Ukrainske derzhavne vydavnytstvo, 1946), 10. 72. DALO f. R-2591, op. 1, sp. 13, p. 5. 73. DALO f. P-3, op. 1, sp. 278, pp. 27–59 (USHMM Acc. 1995.A.1087). 74. Ibid., pp. 27, 28–31, 33–38, 47. Among the four mentions of Jewish victims found by Ilya Altman and Claudio Ingerflom in the official publications of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Soviet Union, one referred to Lviv and, more precisely and restrictively, to the city’s ghetto (“Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 261). 75. DALO f. P-3, op. 1, sp. 278, pp. 44, 49. 76. Ibid., pp. 8, 13 (USHMM Acc.1995.A.1087). 77. Ibid., p. 52. 78. Publications on Lviv for a Western audience in Soviet War News at the end of November 1944 were clearly based on these texts but omitted most references to Jews and the initial pogrom of July 1941. Moreover, Soviet War News inserted POWs as victims in specific locations or incidents where the victims had clearly been Jews, as with the Yanivska camp, described as exterminating POWs, or in describing one SS officer’s infamous habit of shooting victims from his balcony. The ghetto, however, received a whole page. The Germans were described as “treat[ing] the Jews worse than cattle”; the number of victims from the ghetto was given as 133,000; and deportation to Belzec for murder was mentioned. See Soviet Government Statements on Nazi Atrocities (London: Hutchinson, n.d.), 242–56, esp. 245 and 248, based on Soviet War News, 28 and 29 November 1944. 79. DALO f. R-221, op. 2, sp. 76, p. 5 (USHMM Acc.1995.A.1086, reel 30). 80. DALO f. P-3, op. 1, sp. 278, p. 4, and sp. 279, p. 13 (USHMM Acc.1995.A.1087). 81. This report differed from those found by Amir Weiner for Vinnytsia oblast, where victims often had recognizably Jewish names but were not explicitly identified as Jews (Making Sense of War, 213). 82. DALO f. P-3, op. 1, sp. 279, pp. 9–14 (USHMM Acc.1995.A.1087). A minor inconsistency between the final statistics and the preceding text means that we cannot tell from this report whether a particular group of 2,000 Jewish victims was killed on 22 October or December 1942 (ibid., pp. 12, 14). But this affected neither the total numbers or the victims’ identification as Jews. 83. Ibid., p. 10. 84. Ibid., p. 13. 85. Ibid., p. 12. 86. Ibid., p. 10. 87. Ibid., sp. 278, p. 2 (USHMM Acc.1995.A.1087). The divergence between these local reports and the position reflected in the memorandum and the main report for the city of Lviv was not unique. See Katrin Boeckh, Stalinismus in der Ukraine: Die Rekonstruktion des sowjetischen Systems nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007), 284. The September 1941 massacre at Babyn Yar/Babi Yar was another example of this phenomenon. In January 1944, the People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) stated that the Germans had treated Jews “especially badly,” exterminating the entire Jewish population of Kyiv during the occupation. The draft Extraordinary State Commission report for Kyiv also identified the Babi Yar massacre victims as Jewish. Yet in the version published in February 1944, they became “peaceful Soviet citizens”—reverting to a position expressed in a Soviet Foreign Ministry note of 1942, which explained the Babi Yar killings as the result of a merciless drive against “all Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, who

notes to pages 175–181 259 have shown their loyalty to the Soviet authorities.” The Soviet position on Babi Yar at the Nuremberg Trials and at a trial held in Kyiv in January 1946 followed the same line. For similar censoring in Stavropol krai, see Andreas Hilger, “‘Die Gerechtigkeit nehme ihren Lauf’? Die Bestrafung deutscher Kriegs- und Gewaltverbrecher in der Sowjetunion und der SBZ/DDR,” in Transnationale Vergangenheitspolitik: Der Umgang mit deutschen Kriegsverbrechen in Europa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Norbert Frei (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 181; and Marina Sorokina’s chapter in this volume. 88. See Sorokina’s chapter in this volume. The commission was quasi-revived for a short period in 1960, when the authority of its name was employed in a combined publicity and legal campaign against Theodor Oberländer, a West German minister with a substantial Nazi career. Oberländer had probably not committed the specific crimes in Lviv for which this completely instrumentalized Soviet Cold War campaign hounded him. 89. Mordechai Altshuler, “Jewish Holocaust Commemoration Activity in the USSR under Stalin,” Yad Vashem Studies 30 (2002): 274, 283; Altman and Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” 276–78. 90. DALO f. R-312, op. 2, sp. 3, p. 87. 91. L´vovskaia pravda, 31 July 1946, 5. 92. DALO f. P-3, op. 2, sp. 181, p. 29. 93. “Sud nad izmennikom rodiny, ukrainsko-nemetskim natsionalistom A. Barvinskim,” L´vovskaia pravda, 1 February 1948, 8. 94. Ibid., 8. 95. “Zapadnia,” L´vovskaia pravda, 5 February 1948, 8; “Gerbert Knorr, Barvinskiie i drugie,” ibid., 11 February 1948, 6. 96. Shkandrij, Jews in Ukrainian Literature, 174. 97. In 1946, Myhal’s postwar novella Sledy vedut v lis was criticized at the party organization of the Lviv Writers’ Union branch (DALO f. P-3808, op. 1, sp. 8, p. 6). See also Ostap Tarnawski [Tarnavskyi], Literacki Lwów, 1939–1944: Wspomnienia ukraińskiego pisarza (Poznań: Bonami, 2004), 81, 181–87. Tarnavskyi, for instance, who also wrote for L´vivski visti, later discovered that Myhal had ascribed to him a double life as communist underground journalist—one unknown to Tarnavskyi himself (Literacki Lwów, 186). 98. Taras Myhal, Na rozputtiakh veleliudnykh: Pamflety, statti, feiletony, satyrychni ese (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1982), 5. 99. Ibid., 8. 100. Ibid., 9. 101. Ibid., 224. 102. Ibid., 227, 230, 236; my emphasis. 103. Ibid., 238. 104. Vil´na Ukraina, 14 December 1966, 4. 105. DALO f. P-3, op. 10, sp. 90, p. 1. 106. Ivan Fedorenko, “Postril u sertse: Ni, nikoly ne zabudemo fashystskykh zlodian,” Vil´na Ukraina, 23 October 1966, 3. 107. Vladimir Beliaev, Formula Iada (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1970), 3–25. 108. Ibid., 12. 109. Ibid., 20. 110. Ibid., 15. 111. Ibid., 21. 112. In March 1950, an internal document preserved in the files of the Central Commit-

260  notes to pages 181–186 tee of Ukraine showed how complex the effect of Beliaev’s writing on its readers could be. A historian identified only by his surname, Shevchenko, produced a detailed review of Beliaev’s manuscript “Under Foreign Colors,” a collection of pamphlets against the Ukrainian nationalists, the Catholic Church, and the Soviets’ Cold War Western opponents. In production and partially published abroad since 1946, “Under Foreign Colors” was then being subjected to a long, complicated, and contentious review and to rewriting with the aim of publishing it in Ukraine. This sometimes acrimonious discussion turned on major issues of how to depict western Ukraine’s place in the Soviet world and narrative, as well as on contracts and money. Shevchenko, although he did not doubt Beliaev’s good intentions, criticized the manuscript because it spoke “mainly about the destruction of Poles and Jews,” while Ukrainians “appeared only as nationalists” (Tsentral´nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromadskykh ob˝iednan Ukrainy [TsDAHOU] f. 1, op. 30, sp. 2793, pp. 24–39). Because the version of the text that Shevchenko used is not available, we cannot tell whether it explicitly mentioned Polish and Jewish victims or whether its implicit reference to them was enough to trigger Shevchenko’s reaction. 113. The report of 10 September 1979 was leaked to anti-Soviet politicians in 1992 and published in Vysokyi zamok, 16 January 1992, 2. 114. R. M. Brodskii and Iulian Shulmeister, Sionizm—orudie reaktsii (Lviv: Kameniar, 1976), 4, 21, 23. 115. Ibid., 75, 82. 116. Lukasz Hirszowicz notes this specific treatment of the Holocaust in the context of anti-Zionist propaganda (“The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, ed. Dobroszycki and Gurock, 37). 117. Brodskii and Shulmeister, Sionizm, 42. 118. Ibid., 102. 119. Ibid., 103. 120. Iulian Shulmeister, Sovest i beschestie: Pamflety, ocherki, stati (Lvov: Kameniar, 1984), 4–11. 121. Tarik Cyril Amar, “Yom Kippur in Lviv: The Lviv Synagogue and the Soviet Party-State, 1944–1962,” East European Jewish Affairs 35, no. 1 (2005): 91–110. 122. Iulian Shulmeister, Rasplata (Lviv: Kameniar, 1987), esp. 136. 123. Ibid., 31. 124. Mälksoo, “Memory Politics,” 658.

Chapter 9. The Holocaust in the East: Participation and Presentation 1. Haya Golding-Kaiman, “Szczuczyn-Grajewo biz dem letstn otemzug,” in Grayever yizker buch, ed. G. Gorin et al. (New York: fareinikter Grayever hilfs-komitet, 1950), 220. 2. Ibid., 220. 3. See, for example, Jared McBride,” Ukrainian Neighbors: The Holocaust in Olevs´k” (paper presented at the conference on “Exploring the Microhistory of the Holocaust,” École Normale Supérieure, Paris, 5–7 December 2012); Christoph Mick, “Etnische Gewalt und Pogrome in Lemberg, 1914–1941,” Osteuropa 53, no. 12 (2003): 1810–29; and Eliyahu Yonas, Ashan ba-holot: Yehudai Lvov bamilhama (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001). 4. This was not true of the German Democratic Republic, which shifted the blame for the Holocaust to the Federal Republic of Germany, which indeed investigated over 100,000 people “suspected of participating in or committing Nazi crimes. Of this number, courts convicted only 6,487 [1945 to 1992]. . . . Thirteen were sentenced to death . . . 163 to

notes to pages 186–190 261 life imprisonment, 6,197 to temporary imprisonment, and 114 to only fines. . . . Between May 1945 and January 1992, West German courts tried only 1,793 cases related to Nazi capital crimes committed during the war. Of those, 974 led to convictions, while 819 ended with either the court acquitting the defendants or terminating the proceedings for other reasons” (Donald McKale, Nazis after Hitler [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012], 216–17). 5. There was a minor Kristallnacht in Sofia on 20 September 1939. In 1940, laws restricting Jews were passed. In 1943, the Bulgarian government agreed to deport all Jews living in Greek and Yugoslav Macedonia and in Thrace, administered by Bulgaria since 1941. The government also pledged to Eichmann to deport 20,000 Bulgarian Jews, but after Stalingrad, when the Bulgarians realized that the Nazis might lose the war, Deputy Prime Minister Peshev, churchmen, and 42 parliamentary deputies protested the deportations. Within Bulgaria proper, Jews were treated harshly: they could not use main thoroughfares; Jewish houses were identified by a special sign; Jews had to wear a yellow badge, had special identity cards, and were drafted to forced labor. Despite Jewish and non-Jewish protests, Sofia Jews were resettled in the provinces, perhaps a step toward deportation. A concentration camp, Somovit, was established on the Danube, to which prominent Jewish families were sent. King Boris III, killed in a plane crash on 28 August 1943, had endorsed deportations from Macedonia and Thrace but had opposed the deportation of Bulgarian Jews. See Frederick Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution, 1940–1944 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972); Vicky Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1979); Michael Bar-Zohar, Beyond Hitler’s Grasp (Avon, MA: Adams Media, 1998); and A. Matkovski, A History of the Jews in Macedonia (Skopje: Macedonian Review Editions, 1982). 6. This is not to say that all those in Jewish studies read Jewish languages. 7. Tim Cole, with Alberto Giordano, “Micro Histories, Micro Geographies: Budapest 1944 and Scales of Analysis” (paper presented at the conference on “Exploring the Microhistory of the Holocaust,” École Normale Supérieure, Paris, 5–7 December 2012). 8. This idea was first suggested to me by Paul Shapiro, the director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

CONTRIBUTORS

Tarik Cyril Amar, Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, is currently finishing a book on the Sovietization and Ukrainization of the city of Lviv. Between 2007 and 2010, he served as academic director of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv. Harvey Asher received his doctorate from Indiana University. He taught a variety of courses in history and interdisciplinary studies for 35 years at Drury University, a liberal arts school in Springfield, Missouri. His articles on themes in Russian history, U.S. history, and the Holocaust have appeared in the Russian Review, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, the Journal of Genocide Research, the Russian Dictionary, the SHARF Newsletter, Federalism in America: An Encyclopedia, and Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust. He is also the author of The Drury Story Continues, an informal but thorough history of the school, and, most recently, the e-book America—The Owner’s Manual: How Your Country Really Works and How to Keep It Running, based on his blog of the same name at http://americathe ownersmanual.wordpress.com. Karel C. Berkhoff is senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the author of Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (2004, 2008); and Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (2012). Michael David-Fox holds a joint appointment at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of History at Georgetown University. An executive and founding editor of Kritika: Explorations in 263

264  contributors

Russian and Eurasian History, he is the author of Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1921–1929 (1997) and Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Russia, 1921–1941 (2011). His next book, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in the Soviet Union, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press.  Diana Dumitru is associate professor of history at Ion Creangă State University of Moldova. Her first book on Great Britain’s role in the union of the Romanian principalities was published in 2010, and she is currently finishing a book on the relationship between Jews and gentiles in the Soviet Union and Romania between 1918 and 1945. Her articles have appeared in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Yad Vashem Studies, among others. Her World Politics article, “Constructing Interethnic Conflict and Cooperation: Why Some People Harmed Jews and Others Helped Them during the Holocaust in Romania,” received the 2012 Mary Parker Follett Award for the best article or chapter published in the field of politics and history. Zvi Gitelman is professor of political science and Preston Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He has just published Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: An Uncertain Ethnicity (2012). John-Paul Himka is professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. He has coedited, with Joanna Michlic, Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (2013). Currently he is writing a monograph on the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust. Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński’s The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (2006); and The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe (2013). Vladimir Solonari is associate professor at the Department of History, University of Central Florida. His Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania, 1940–1944 was published in 2010. He is also the author of articles and essays published in Kritika:

contributors 265

Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, East European Politics and Societies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and other academic journals and collections of essays. Marina Sorokina is head of the Department for the History of the Russian Diaspora at the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Russia Abroad House in Moscow. She recently edited Rossiiskoe nauchnoe zarubezh´e: Biograficheskii slovar´ (The Russian Scientific Emigration: A Biographical Dictionary [2011]).