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
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses / edited by Michael David-
Fox, 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 “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population”: The Holocaust
in the Soviet Media, 1941–45 83
Karel C. Berkhoff
Chapter 6 People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation
of Nazi Crimes in the USSR  118
Marina Sorokina
Chapter 7 An Analysis of Soviet Postwar Investigation and Trial
Documents and Their Relevance for Holocaust Studies  142
Diana Dumitru

v
vi  contents

Chapter 8 A Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust in the

Soviet West as an Anti-Site of Memory  158
Tarik Cyril Amar
Chapter 9 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 geno-
cide of the Jews on Soviet territory—the “Holocaust in the East”—were al-
most 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 Ho-
locaust 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 un-
precedented 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 Holo-
caust as a part of Soviet history. New scholarly agendas have begun to ad-
dress 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 phenome-
non 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 Rus-

sian 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 John-
Paul 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—dramati-
cally 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 con-
sensus 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 fundamen-
tal 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 for-
mation of the Soviet system. The consensus lay in seeing the structures of
the Soviet system—the planned economy, collectivized agriculture, Marxist-
Leninist ideology as regulated through the party-state—as essentially set in
place by the end of the 1930s. Western historiography investigated the revolu-
tion 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 fun-
damental 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 in-
volved the Nazi occupation regimes, the wartime alliance, and large num-
bers 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 mani-
festo 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 under-
scored the startling neglect of the wartime experience among Russian and
Soviet specialists.5 My notion of an “internalist-structuralist consensus” dif-
fers 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 fol-
lowed, 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 di-
mension moved toward the center of the historiography.6 The outcome of the
revolution in Stalinism was still important but not so dominant that it pre-
cluded the impact of later periods, and the Stalin period itself was more fre-
quently 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 re-
flected 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 impor-
tant 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 pol-
icy, and on the multiethnic borderlands.9 Furthermore, the war and its af-
termath 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 interac-
tions between these systems predate the war and emerged out of the rela-
tionship 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 entangle-
ments between the regimes and ideologies exponentially in scope and made
them into matters of life and death. To consider this most consequential in-
terchange 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 occupa-
tion 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 un-
derstanding 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 ter-
ritory 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 So-
viet field can contribute to the study of the Holocaust concerns local perpe-
trators. 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 So-
viet 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 si-
multaneously. 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 fun-
damental structures remained intact. Moreover, once the academic bound-
aries surrounding what is considered intrinsically belonging to one field or
another are made more flexible—and once boundary crossings in areas pre-
viously 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 re-
gimes. This occurred as Nazism and Stalinism were locked in a military and
ideological war on a scale that virtually defies the imagination. These cir-
cumstances in and of themselves should provide the grist for historical inves-
tigation 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 immer-
sion in the local languages, cultural traditions, and historical contexts of
the region. Raul Hilberg’s magisterial, indispensable, pathbreaking Destruc-
tion 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 ma-
jor 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 Holo-
caust 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, par-
tially fueled by Gross’s work itself and partially responding to the same im-
pulses 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 anti-
Jewish 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 publica-
tion of Neighbors in 2001, however, many studies on this violence have ap-
peared, 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 survi-
vors’ 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 Jew-
ish 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 be-
ginning 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 tri-
als 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 So-
viet 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 ac-
count.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 postcom-
munist 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 So-
viet and Polish communist discourse comforted them that although these
things had happened, they were not very meaningful and required no reck-
oning. 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 ar-
rival 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 investiga-
tion on the basis of the so-called August Decree issued by the communist-
dominated Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), which called
for criminal charges against Nazi collaborators. Following a rather lax inves-
tigation, 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, how-
ever, 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 book-
stores, a virtual silence reigned.5 Then, in November 2000, the leading Pol-
ish 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 sur-
mises 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 massa-
cre but decline to employ physical coercion? Perhaps the Germans merely en-
couraged 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 col-
laboration. 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 pres-
sure—and fear of retribution by their own neighbors, all of whom had an
interest in concealing the town’s participation—that motivated the recanta-
tions on the day of the trial.11
Gross’s second important source is testimony by Jewish survivors, in par-
ticular 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 ar-
gues 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 Was-
ersztajn’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 Pol-
ish 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 al-
leged 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 Na-
zis 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 anti-
Nazi 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 Ber-
man.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 posi-
tions 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 appar-
ently 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 totalitari-
anism. 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 Polish-
Jewish 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 dramati-
cally 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 accor-
dance 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 Belorus-
sian 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 Totalitar-
ian regimes’ refusal to acknowledge that the realm of the possible was cir-
cumscribed (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 Ukrai-
nian-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 hypoth-
eses. 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 re-

gime 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 under-
standing 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 organi-
zation and industrial methods in favor of sticks and stones, fire and water);
the improvisations of local caciques; and impulsive responses from the sur-
rounding 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 histo-
rians more deeply appreciate Polish heroism and martyrdom. His first ma-
jor 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 val-
ues: “What, then, was the message of the underground that permits us to de-
scribe 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 confronta-
tion 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 op-
pressed 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 de-
portees 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 or-
dering 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 en-
gages 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. Totali-
tarianism’s “origins,” hence, are not an issue in this book; the focus, rather,
is on how the local population negotiated a relationship to something for-
eign 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 con-
tempt” 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 in-
sights 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 trans-
parency between public and private realms, and the blurring of the distinc-
tion between victim and oppressor.36 In Gross’s reading, the Soviet regime
achieved this control in part through a certain lawlessness and arbitrari-
ness.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 complic-
ity and its attempt to implicate everyone. In short, the leaders of the Stalin-
ist 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 pop-
ulation 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 phenom-
enon 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 no-
tice.”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 Institu-
tion Archive) of thousands of Polish citizens who fell under Soviet occupa-
tion 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 hu-
man 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 be-
ginning 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 Po-
lonsky 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 government-
in-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 danger-
ous 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 Na-
zis’ 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 Ukrai-
nians) 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 disproportion-
ately 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 re-
turned 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 hospi-
tal 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 eaves-
dropping 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 au-
thor 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’ subjec-
tivizing 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 mur-
derers’ 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 famil-

iar 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, dispa-
rate 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 dif-
ferently 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 anti-
semites 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 Was-
ersztajn’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 Polish-
Jewish relations during the war; of how what happened in Jedwabne is some-
thing 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 Re-
spond includes the editors’ excellent and accessible introduction to the Jed-
wabne 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-Jew-
ish 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 dia-
logue 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, counterac-
cusations, and antisemitic apologetics, others rose to the occasion and re-
sponded 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 Na-
tional 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 con-
troversy 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 popula-
tion 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 pro-
fessionalism and integrity, is impressive. Revealed in this volume is another
kind of influence Gross has exerted on Polish historians—a postmodern self-
consciousness slipping through the cracks in positivist scholarship. In his ar-
ticle 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 Finkel-
sztejn’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, in-
cluding 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 continu-
ally 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 antici-
pate 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 fel-
low citizens of Jewish nationality in Jedwabne. A crime—in which it is still
difficult for me to believe—committed with the decisive participation of peo-
ple, 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 en-
gagement 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 Jed-
wabne 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 or-
dered 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 op-
eration.68 Despite this local variety, it emerges from the article that certain
“motifs” repeated themselves time and time again: Polish townspeople wel-
coming the Germans as liberators from Soviet oppression and żydokomuna;
Polish participation in a local auxiliary police; the Germans giving the Pol-
ish 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 Rus-
sian 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 inten-
tionally 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 ac-
count. 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 con-
cludes 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 perpetra-
tion sensu largo of this crime. The executors of these crimes, as perpetra-
tors 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 numer-
ous 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 con-
sensus among IPN historians is that neither Nazi propaganda nor the legacy
of prewar antisemitism was the decisive factor in the Poles’ positive recep-
tion 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 some-
what awkwardly between describing the “myth existing to this day of all
Jews’ betrayal during the Soviet occupation” and asserting that Jewish col-
laboration with the Soviets was in fact widespread.79 On one hand, he de-
scribes 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 oc-
cupation brought Jews no fewer disappointments and sufferings than it did
to other national groups living in western Belarus.”81 On the other hand, Wi-
erzbicki 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 advance-
ment; 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 Kazakh-
stan and Siberia or by executing them), Wierzbicki notes, many Jews took
over their positions as teachers and civil servants. In this way, among oth-
ers, 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 Sovi-
ets, 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 Be-
larusians, 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 posi-
tion 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 inau-
gurated 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 vari-
ous 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 “understand-
able”? 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 can-
didly 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 Pol-
ish Jews in the Soviet occupation of the eastern territories. In an article titled
“Przemilczana kolaboracja” (Collaboration Passed Over in Silence), Strzem-
bosz 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 aggres-
sion 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 inhabit-
ants 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 conver-
sation 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 Pol-
ish 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. Support-
ing 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 em-
phasized 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 ad-
dressed 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 Jed-
wabne 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 dis-
cussion, 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 lo-
cal 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 nim-
ble / 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 seri-
ous 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—under-
stand 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/Neigh-
bors. 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 trav-
eled 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 Eich-
mann 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 mas-
sacre 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 ques-
tion of whether it was the Poles who murdered the Jews in Jedwabne quickly
metamorphosed into the question of whether the Jews in the kresy collabo-
rated 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 Jew-
ish 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’ col-
laboration with the Soviets from the Poles’ widespread perception that the
Jews collaborated en masse. On one hand, Jews were indisputably overrepre-
sented 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 frac-
tion 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 Jew-
ish 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 twen-
tieth century. Among other things, it has led to a revisiting of the half-cen-
tury-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 Hork-
heimer, 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 con-
sciences” 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 Ho-
locaust 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 resis-
tance, 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 Mor-
decai 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 occupa-
tion; 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 noto-
rious 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, Bolshe-
vism 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 exten-
sive 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 Ho-
locaust 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 Holo-
caust, 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 of-
fers 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 collec-
tivization—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 coun-
try 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 contin-
gency 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 wag-
ing war against the Nazis.
A key source for studying this question is the memoir by General Pet-
renko. The last survivor among the four generals who conducted the libera-
tion 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 Acad-
emy), where he worked for 20 years, serving as chairman of the Operations
Department after receiving his doctorate in military studies. In 1977, he re-
tired 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, Pe-
trenko 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 politi-
cal 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 en-
countered 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 So-
viet 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 Vis-
tula 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 sur-
rounding 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 Jan-
uary 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 forti-
fications 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 de-
lay 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 com-
manders had received a precise order to liberate Auschwitz-Birkenau. Trou-
bled 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) informa-
tion 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 sup-
plies, 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 unsuccess-
fully, 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 coin-
cidentally 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 poli-
cies 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 af-
ter 1944, when the task was first proposed and after most of its victims had al-
ready 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 facto-
ries 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 synthetic-
oil 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 pris-
oner 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 inef-
fective. 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, op-
position 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 So-
lution 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 sum-
mer 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 Ger-
many 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 any-
thing, 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 mother-
land 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 Is-
raeli 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 suf-
fering of the Jews. Even when accounts of atrocities ignored the victims’ na-
tionality, 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 spe-
cifically against Jews were acknowledged, the deaths of women and children
were often cited separately, creating the impression that they were not Jew-
ish.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 Ger-
mans invaded the Soviet Union. Mordecai Altshuler therefore properly con-
cludes 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 Pet-
renko’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 Na-
tional 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 terri-
tory. 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 sta-
tus 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 ac-
cession to power in 1933 to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. A
key Politburo decision of September 1935 stopped the flow of Jewish refu-
gees 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 Af-
fairs (NKVD) supervision.26 Offers of financial assistance from Jewish or-
ganizations 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 dic-
tated 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 pro-
moted, like Solomon Abramovich Lozovskii, the future head of the Soviet
Information Bureau (Sovinformbiuro). Even Litvinov later received impor-
tant new responsibilities, including a 1941 appointment as ambassador to the
United States.
From the annexations of eastern Poland and northern Bukovina permit-
ted by the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement until the June 1941 German in-
vasion, 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 be-
ing 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 abol-
ished 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 ideo-
logically 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 coun-
tries 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. Be-
cause the national identity was strong among these Jews, and their culture
differed from that of their Soviet Jewish brethren—they had their own po-
litical 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 Ger-
man-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 Pol-
ish territories on 28 September 1939. The Israeli historian Dov Levin believes
that the deportations were “the dénouement of a lengthy series of Soviet at-
tempts 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 insuf-
ficiently 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 deliber-
ate discrimination.
Many scholars have remarked that after the signing of the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939, Soviet propaganda became silent about Nazi
persecution of the Jews. But was it this silence that explains the unwilling-
ness of the Jews to evacuate the Nazi-occupied territory for the east? The evi-
dence 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 kill-
ing 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 situ-
ation, 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 orga-
nizations 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 favor-
able light. After all, the Party’s official policy was to crack down on antisem-
itism, 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 chauvin-
ism,” “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 prac-
tice 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 ap-
proximately 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 num-
ber of Jews who had made it to Vladivostok were given Japanese “Sugihara vi-
sas” 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 terror-
ized 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 Po-
land 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 ren-
dered 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 propa-
ganda 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 fol-
lowing the invasion, a more generous Soviet policy could have saved thou-
sands of lives.
In a speech on 7 November 1941, Stalin for the first and last time spe-
cifically 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 sev-
eral 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 com-
muniqué specifically on the extermination of the Soviet Jews. The report
indicates that the Kremlin knew of the systematic killing that began immedi-
ately 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 ac-
curate.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 be-
cause some of them were antisemites. Even if they had wished, it would have
been well-nigh impossible for partisan units to integrate entire Jewish fami-
lies into their mobile, high-risk operations.44
After the victory at Stalingrad, Soviet leaders reduced official commu-
niqués to a minimum, though there does not seem to have been an all-en-
compassing written or oral order imposing an information blackout on the
extermination of the Jews.45 In a February 1944 memo, however, Aleksan-
drov, 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 So-
viet subjects who had been annihilated by the Nazis. The Jews were hence-
forth 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 po-
litical refugees.)
As General Petrenko tells us, however, the Jews were specifically men-
tioned in the reports of the army’s political organs between 26 and 31 Janu-
ary. 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 pro-
paganda 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 So-
viet transfers of entire nationalities, such as the Chechens and Volga Ger-
mans.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 So-
viet Jews during the Holocaust. What transpired, the two authors demon-
strate, 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 im-
pact on the Jews’ survival: “Neither from the Soviet state nor from the Party
was there a single appeal to underground organizations or the local popula-
tion 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 So-
viet Jewish policies, even if this is hard to prove conclusively. Given the long
history of official and popular antisemitism in the Russian empire—the po-
groms, the Pale of Settlement, economic discrimination, education quotas,
religious discrimination, forced assimilation, state encouragement of anti-
semitism, 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 prac-
tices 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 So-
viet 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 perpe-
trated 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 compara-

tive 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 antisem-
itism, 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’ en-
emies, 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 deci-
sion 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 ap-
parent 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 Al-
bert 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 Mi-
khoels 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 He-
brew in Palestine. Mikhoels and the JAC’s executive secretary, Shakhno Ep-
shtein, recommended to Agitprop official Aleksandr Sergeevich Shcherbakov
that the U.S. proposal be accepted. When Mikhoels, the poet Isaak Solomo-
novich “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 Sovinform-
biuro and party representative on the JAC board, for permission to negoti-
ate. 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 Yid-
dish-language writers, the widely read wartime journalist Ilya Ehrenburg
(Il´ia Erenburg) chaired a second board consisting mostly of Russian writ-
ers. 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 mate-
rial 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 sec-
ond, 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 publish-
ing 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 situ-
ation 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 sep-
arate 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 suffi-
cient.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 he-
roic.59 The revised manuscript, after approval by the censorship agency Glav-
lit, 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 Brit-
ain, and five other countries).60
It was not, however, published in the Soviet Union. That failure led Mi-
khoels to appeal to Central Committee Secretary Andrei Aleksandrovich
Zhdanov for help on 28 November 1946. Zhdanov forwarded Mikhoels’s let-
ter 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 Agit-
prop, on which Mikhail Andreevich Suslov had replaced the Sovinform-
biuro 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 publica-
tion, 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 “po-
lice” in the Black Book. In Berdichev (Berdychiv), for example, “not only the
Germans but the police, abetted by members of the ‘Black Hundreds,’ par-
ticipated 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, presum-
ably 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 Jew-
ish help from abroad, so the value of both the publication and its JAC spon-
sors diminished. Both were wartime anomalies, tolerated largely because the
desperation of the Soviets’ military situation outweighed ideological reserva-
tions. 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 tight-
rope 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 high-
lighting 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 stem-
ming 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 “defense-
less and persecuted Jews.”70 At a minimum, then, the suppression of the Black
Book provided an implicit message of how Soviet domestic and foreign poli-
cies were evolving.
-----
In post-Soviet Russia and the newly independent states, glasnost has made
possible reappraisals of the Holocaust. A Holocaust Foundation was estab-
lished 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 mem-
bership 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 situ-
ation, other Holocaust Foundation goals include the development of educa-
tional 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 permis-
sion 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 commemora-
tion 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 initia-
tive 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 wide-
spread grappling with wartime events.
While antisemitism likely plays some role in the continuing relative si-
lence 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 De-
spite the important efforts of Altman and his colleagues, one might hazard
a guess that as memories of the Great Patriotic War fade from public mem-
ory—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 res-
urrecting 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 emotion-
ally charged issues. Although scholars research events that occurred in dif-
ferent 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’ at-
titudes 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 es-
pecially horrid episode of the mass murder of Jews, in which the participa-
tion 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 predi-
cated on his intimation that the killers were guided neither by Nazi occupi-
ers’ 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 Al-
though Gross does say that the Holocaust has to be accounted for as a “system
which functioned according to the preconceived (though constantly evolv-
ing) plan,” he expresses his doubts about the tendency in the scholarly litera-
ture 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 be-
havior.”3 By invoking the imagery of the Henryk Sienkiewicz national saga
of seventeenth-century wars, Trilogy, from the pages of which the murder-
ous 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 impli-
cations 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 rel-
evant 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 bor-
derlands—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 barbari-
ties. 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 Ro-
manian 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 cover-
ing many territories and various cultures and presents a sophisticated inter-
pretation 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 bor-
derlands.9 As I show below, Romanians exercised substantially larger control
over antisemitic actions by local populations in the days and weeks right af-
ter 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 town-
ships), since it was there that the killing of Jews was systematic and ubiqui-
tous. 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 lo-
calities. 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 neigh-
bors. 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 Organiza-
tions, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR, henceforth called the
Extraordinary State Commission. Finally, clarification of the killers’ motiva-
tions 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 actu-
ally 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 lo-
cal residents of the areas under investigation, rather than the crimes of the
Romanian military and gendarmes, which were the subject of Romanian ju-
risprudence. 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 in-
vestigations 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 peo-
ples” 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 re-
buked 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 some-
times 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—prob-
ably 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 inves-
tigators 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 activ-
ists performed the entire task. Sometimes the commissioners could count on
the cooperation of the locals; sometimes, as in the mountainous areas of Bu-
kovina, 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 ideologi-
cally loaded language, which in some instances makes their records barely
comprehensible. In other cases, however, they would collect handwritten ac-
counts 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 So-
viet 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 be-

havior, 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 sur-
vivors (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 suf-
fering in the Cerninăuţi ghetto or in transit and concentration camps in Bu-
kovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria.

The Logistics of Mass Murder

In the interwar period, Bessarabia and Bukovina were part of Greater Roma-
nia as it emerged after World War I. In late June and early July 1940, in ac-
cordance 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–Au-
gust 1941, Romania, in alliance with Nazi Germany, which it joined in at-
tacking 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, gendar-
merie, and police, in collaboration with local gentiles, engaged in a campaign
of indiscriminate violence against the Jews. According to the most authori-
tative 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 him-
self—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 lo-
gistical 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 de-
tain 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 tra-
ditions 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 Ger-
man 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 ci-
vilians in the provinces. To give just one example, on 8 July 1941, the Thir-
teenth Regiment of Mountain Troops (Vânători de munte) entered the village
of Cupca (Kupka) in northern Bukovina; immediately, its commander, Colo-
nel 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 post-
war 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 Dni-
ester 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 en-
trusted with the preservation of order in rural areas of the country. In times
of war, supplementary gendarme battalions were created to serve as the ar-
my’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, specifi-
cally 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 minis-
ter 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 investiga-
tors 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 gen-
darmes 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 with-
out 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 de-
pendent 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 pres-
sure 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 sev-
eral 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 pro-
ceeded 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 differ-
ent. 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, tor-
mented him. So he resolved to follow Mânecuţa’s lead: he transmitted the or-
der 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 vil-
lages 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 gen-
darmes 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 Con-
stantin 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 So-
viet 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 com-
manders and gendarmes to participate in that campaign. Although the ini-
tiative and order came from above, mass killings would have never taken
place without the enthusiastic support of mid-level military officers and gen-
darmes. By the same token, for the “cleansing” operation to succeed, mas-
sive 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 will-
ingly, without being forced by the German occupiers: gentile locals organized
themselves for the purpose of mass murder and accomplished it without as-
sistance. Whether this description is true or not (and there are those who
question some of its aspects), it is instructive to ask whether a “Jedwabne-
type” 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 com-
mittee of Romanian power was created in Ghirovo, in which a group of lo-
cals, 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 So-
viet 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 activ-
ists 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 mobi-
lized 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 post-

war investigation files, and in a book by Marius Mircu, a Romanian Jewish
journalist who in 1945 wrote an astonishingly accurate account of the mas-
sacres 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 Roma-
nian, 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 ar-
rived.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 garrot-
ing, beating with clubs, strangulation, and other means. Killings continued
until the arrival of the Romanian gendarmes subordinated to Major Berz-
escu, 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 mas-
sive 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 lo-
cal gentiles, who for the most part preferred to have them all killed. A deci-
sive 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 lo-
calities.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 con-
siderable 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 gendar-
merie, 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 pop-
ular 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 dis-
cernible: the breakdown of law and order, chaotic mass participation, and
the plunder of property compounded by indiscriminate beatings and the oc-
casional killings of victims.47 Everywhere pogroms were preceded by news,
brought either by word of mouth or by the advancing Romanian units (usu-
ally scouts) that the highest authority allowed inhabitants to commit po-
groms 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 beat-
ings 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 Bu-
kovina.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 na-
ked. 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 Extraor-
dinary State Commission contain additional data.55
Here the pogrom and killings of Jews started before the Romanians’ ar-
rival. The violence was triggered by two local Ukrainian peasants who, ac-
cording 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 orga-
nization. They pressed the issue with every eyewitness and defendant but in-
variably 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 ar-
rived, 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 character-
ized the pogromists, particularly their leaders. For instance, one of them, An-
drei 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 lack-
ing 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 trig-
ger 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 Ro-
mania, the data collected by Marius Mircu—tends to agree that the inten-
sity 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 to-
ward 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 popu-
lation 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 mur-
derous 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 effec-
tively control the situation after the departure of the Soviets and before the
Romanians’ arrival. They even engaged retreating Red Army troops in nu-
merous 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 national-
ist 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 obvi-
ously 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, Roma-
nians 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 north-
ern 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 Ukrai-
nian 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 Ukrai-
nian 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 demonstrat-
ing 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 Ro-
manian 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 ubiq-
uity 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 ev-
ery 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 Char-
acteristically, it was not only former Cuzists who sometimes used to boast of
killing Jews and displaying extreme cruelty toward them; some killers with-
out 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 ar-
rested 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 Bu-
kovina.72 The list of categories of people earmarked for deportation by the So-
viets 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, how-
ever, 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 still-
mysterious 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 ex-
pelled 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 dis-
tricts of the province further to the east, away from the border with Roma-
nia. 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 gov-
ernment 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 selec-
tion 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 won-
der 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 Ci-
uciuleni 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 peas-
ants, 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 [well-
to-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 defini-
tion Communists, pro-Soviet, and anti-Romanian and had to be dealt with
accordingly.
According to a few eyewitnesses in the postwar investigations, perpetra-
tors 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, ex-

plained to the local priest his reasoning for killing Jews: “Soviet power de-
ported 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 selec-
tion 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 retreat-
ing 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 ideo-
logical 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 So-
viets 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 sum-
mer 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 vil-

lages (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 prop-
erty 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 non-
Jewish 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 gen-
darme 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, pop-
ulated 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 Au-
gust 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 infor-
mation. The governor was visibly displeased. “The army does stupid things,
and we have to fix them,” he said when he heard Drăgulescu’s report. Accord-
ing 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 “cleans-
ing the terrain” at the conference in Fălticeni, which Drăgulescu did not at-
tend. 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 en-
emies 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, de-
clared 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 abun-
dant 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 re-
garding Ukrainians as a more immediate threat.95 Again, we can see how lo-
cal 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 col-
laborators. 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 pro-
paganda 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 subor-
dinates had previously collected and supplied to his office. “It is very curi-
ous,” 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 pro-
vided the following numbers: in Bălţi county, of 192 chiefs (conducători) un-
der 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 double-
checked 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 practi-
cally 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-So-
viet 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 prov-
inces 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 An-
tonescu 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 popula-
tion.”98 Especially worrying from a Romanian perspective was that the so-
called 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 Voi-
culescu pointed out in April 1942, he could not “put everybody [guilty of col-
laboration] 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 mer-
ited 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” Commu-
nists 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—ex-
cept 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 Bessara-
bia, 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 of-
ficer, 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 Ro-
manian 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, ap-
prehending 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 build-
ings—a highly unpopular corvée.106 For this, gardists received a meager sal-
ary, 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 lo-
cals. 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 tem-
porarily, 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 col-
loquialism 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 liter-
ate 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, kill-
ers sometimes received on-the-spot compensation. Usually the Romanian
military and gendarmes would allow their helpers to search the dead bod-
ies 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 ex-
ample, 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 compen-
sation, 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 interro-
gated, 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 pos-
sible 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 sim-
plest 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 out-
right 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 horren-
dous, and most barbaric massacres in the whole wave of murder in Bessara-
bia 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 massa-
cre 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 famil-
iar 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 short-
age 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 Ser-
geenko (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, how-
ever, 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 supposi-
tion 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 fail-
ure, 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 val-
ley, 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 anti-
semitism 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, Ser-
geenko 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 Ro-
manian 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 Ger-
maniuk (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—as-
sisted 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 tormen-
tors 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 execu-
tion 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 them-
selves. 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 imme-
diately 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 il-
literate 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 exam-
ple, 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 Bu-
kovina? 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 Ro-
manian 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 gen-
darmerie, participation of the local populations in anti-Jewish violence was
massive and ubiquitous. Everywhere, Jews were beaten, robbed of their pos-
sessions, 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 nation-
alists 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 Ger-
man) 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 mur-
der 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 en-
trusted to them—arresting and killing Jews; or sadistic instincts and a primi-
tive 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 mo-
tivating participation in anti-Jewish violence. The most difficult and pain-
ful 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 respon-
sible for that outrage, those people tended to be Christian rather than Jew-
ish. In response to that situation, Romanian authorities developed a policy of
protecting former Soviet activists of non-Jewish origin against their venge-
ful 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 prob-
able 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. Roma-
nians, 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 neigh-
bors, 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 anti-
Jewish 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 system-
atic 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, nonindoctri-
nated local gentiles engaged in more traditional forms of antisemitic rioting:
beating, plundering, and humiliating Jews. But this behavior, though mor-
ally 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 anti-
semitism. On 30 November 1936, Pravda reported Viacheslav Mikhailovich
Molotov’s speech of five days earlier on the occasion of the new Soviet con-
stitution. 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 situ-
ation. 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 denun-
ciation 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 antip-
athy 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 target-
ing 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 to-
day 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 war-
time 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 “informa-
tion 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 excep-
tions, the wartime Soviet media made “no mention of the fact that the [So-
viet] 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, Jef-
frey Brooks also found Soviet reports on the killings of Jews “scarce,” with
even writers of Jewish descent such as Ehrenburg downplaying their “ex-
ceptionality.”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 per-
petrated by the SS, SD, and the Wehrmacht, and in particular the ‘industri-
alized’ 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, Morde-
chai Altshuler, Lukasz Hirszowicz, and Amir Weiner have written, respec-
tively, that “accessible information about the Germans’ anti-Jewish atrocities
had returned to the official Soviet media from the very first days of the Ger-
man–Soviet war”; that “a considerable amount of material about the Holo-
caust (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 Alt-
man (Il´ia Al´tman), Joshua Rubenstein, and Corinne Ducey—explicitly
counter the notion that Soviet coverage was deliberately meager or nonexis-
tent 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,” mean-
ing after the battle of Stalingrad in early 1943. Before then, a different situa-
tion 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 exter-
mination of the Jews” but refers almost exclusively to Ehrenburg.15
None of these analyses of the wartime Soviet media and the Jews clari-
fied 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 to-
tal 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 ref-
erence 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) ar-
chives 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 intel-
ligence 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 dis-
abled 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 Belorus-
sia, 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 (Sovinform-
biuro)—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 popula-
tion 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 analy-
sis 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 exter-
mination 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 Ger-
many.) 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 re-
ports, this means that early on, Stalin and his associates were told by vari-
ous sources that the Nazis were exterminating all Jews and Gypsies (Roma
and Sinti). They had no lack of information. Our investigation of media re-
ports 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 cre-
ated 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 re-
ported 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 per-
secution 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, Belorus-
sians 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 Sec-
ond Plenary Meeting of the JAC, Mikhoels and Shakhno Epshtein sent Sta-
lin 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 popu-
lar 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 disap-
pear 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. (Omit-
ted here was a statement that the “ashes of Babi Yar [Ukr. Babyn iar] are sear-
ing our hearts.”)
Early in the war, the prominent Russian Jewish writer and journalist Eh-
renburg suggested to Shcherbakov that the central press publish an article by
a well-known Russian figure denouncing the “fairy tale” that “Hitler is an-
gry only with the Jews.” Eventually, only he himself had such an article pub-
lished. 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 li-
cense 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 Ukrai-
nian 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 in-
doctrinated 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 al-
ways 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. Never-
theless, 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 in-
cluded 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 un-
able 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 Ger-
mans 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 dan-
ger 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 explana-
tion.) Whether Kalinin actually wrote the article is unclear. In any event,
“Petrov” argued that according to the “fascist” ideology, the “Jews, who, fas-
cism 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 pas-
sage (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 cleans-
ing 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 per-
sonally 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 Hit-
lerite hordes kill and rape peaceful inhabitants of our country, without spar-
ing 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 Ukrai-
nian town of Lozova on 22 January 1942, Pravda reported that the “Hitler-
ites” 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 meet-
ings, 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 refer-
ring to Jews as victims (in L´viv, Kiev, and elsewhere), and in its characteriza-
tion 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. Wal-
ter 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 con-
cerns 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 retal-
iation 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 sup-
press 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 cam-
paign 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 incon-
sistent, 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 cit-
ies; Sovetskaia Ukraina described the shooting of the Jews of Mariiupol´
and Artemivs´k in Ukraine’s Donets´ River basin; and Pravda’s Petr Alek-
sandrovich Lidov wrote that “almost the entire Jewish population of Minsk
has been exterminated.”55 In contrast, a report about Dnipropetrovs´k omit-
ted 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 proc-
lamation of a “non-Jewish” line, Molotov’s third note of 27 April 1942. Deal-
ing with “monstrous villainies, atrocities, and outrages committed by the
German-fascist invaders,” this text emphasized more than any other lead-
ing 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, Belorus-
sian, 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 Philan-
thropic 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 belong-
ings. 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 Ha-
tred), published in Pravda to mark the first anniversary of the German inva-
sion, 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 with-
out 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 un-
willingness among some officials to fully adopt the line expressed by Mo-
lotov. Speakers from Belorussia, Estonia, and Lithuania followed him in
omitting Jews but singled out the threat to just one other non-Russian na-
tionality. 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 Esto-
nian 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 Jus-
tas 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 extermi-

nation 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 Ro-
manovych 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 cap-
tured 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 mer-
ited 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 gov-
ernment-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 great-
est 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 at-
tention, 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 bul-
letin 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 Czechoslo-
vakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Norway, Greece, Belgium, Holland, and Lux-
embourg 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 tri-
bunal, Moscow “confirmed” that the crimes were “universal and deliberate,”
though the Soviet Union, it implied, had suffered the most: the German gov-
ernment 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 popula-
tion,” 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 perspec-
tive instead was that of a larger planned assault on many peoples, not just
the Jews: “Recently, throughout the territories of the countries of Europe oc-
cupied by the German-fascist invaders, a new intensification of the Hitler-
ite 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 ani-
mal 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 civil-
ian 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 ac-
celerated rate their special plan for the total extermination of the Jewish popu-
lation 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 “di-
vert 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 exter-
mination of entire peoples, especially the Slavs.” As a result, “about three mil-
lion 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 “in-
tention to exterminate the Polish people,” as well as that the “German au-
thorities 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 Czer-
niaków 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 of-
ficials 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, eth-
nic Ukrainians, that their suffering was not being overlooked. Articles mark-
ing 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 Novem-
ber 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 edito-
rial 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 dev-
ilish project to physically exterminate the Ukrainians and all the Slavs.”82 Ac-
cording 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 else-
where beyond the Soviet Union as Jews. A good example of the neglect of So-
viet 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 per-
haps 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 Jew-
ish 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, sol-
diers 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 es-
tablishments.” Evgenii Genrikhovich Kriger of Izvestiia extensively quoted a
witness, Dmitrii Orlov, who began by mentioning the Jews and then suppos-
edly kept referring to “people.”87 Reports about recaptured Kharkiv, mean-
while, 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 Tik-
honov 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 Investi-
gation 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) com-
piled 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 documen-
tary 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 post-
war 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 primar-
ily, 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, Molda-
via, 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-stand-
ing 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 incred-
ible 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 ex-
humation 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 Lenin-
grad, 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 admit-
ted 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 useful-
ness 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 includ-
ing 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 ban-
dits 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 Ci-
vilians” 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 pas-
sage: “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 com-
mandant 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 Rus-
sian-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 men-
tion Jews.109
Thus some Extraordinary State Commission reports referred to Soviet
Jews, and the Russian papers published some reports by other prominent fig-
ures 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 in-
creasing publicity about non-Soviet Jews. To begin with, TASS issued with-
out 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 be-
longing 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 cam-
paign 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 War-
saw 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 pro-
duced, on 16 April 1943, a denunciation by the Sovinformbiuro, personally
modified by Stalin, of the “Foul Fabrications of the German-Fascist Hench-
men”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 Po-
land, 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 pur-
pose, 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 coun-
tries.” I. Sergeeva reported on 21 April that Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign
minister-in-exile, had said earlier that year that Germany had officially ad-
mitted 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 Po-
land 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 mis-
taken 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 in-
side.” 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 popula-
tion 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 provoca-
tion from the fascist cannibals,” blaming “German butchers” for the Vin-
nytsia 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 ex-
termination 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 ab-
sent; 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 ghet-
tos, then from Czechoslovakia, Oświęcim (Osventsim, Auschwitz), and War-
saw. 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 narrow-
gauge 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 through-
out Europe.124 Today’s estimate is that 20,000 non-Jews, mostly Poles, Rus-
sians, 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 nation-
ality, 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 every-
thing humane in occupied Europe.” The survivors he quoted had also been in
Dachau, Buchenwald, and even Auschwitz (Os´ventsim), but they called Ma-
jdanek worse.127 There were ample details about the gassings, the sorting of
victims’ clothes and shoes, and sadistic tortures. One man from Lublin, Gor-
batov 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 com-
pletely 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 nationali-
ties 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 mil-
lion” 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 “Hit-
lerites” 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 place-
ment 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 transpar-
ent 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 Pol-
ish patriots” had been sent to the camp in Auschwitz (Osvetsim), TASS re-
ported. 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 al-
most 3,000,000 “men, women, and children” had died from “hunger and epi-
demics” 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 con-
centration 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 Eu-
rope,” the report went, “the Germans take tens of thousands of people of var-
ious 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 en-
titled 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 num-
bers 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 Wash-
ington 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 en-
tire Jewish community in Hungary, numbering 1,000,000 people, is threat-
ened by extermination.”139

The Last Months of the War

The situation changed in 1945. On 2 February 1945, Pravda carried an emo-
tional report by the correspondent Boris Nikolaevich Polevoi from Aus-
chwitz, 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 coun-
tries, 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 vari-
ous 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 pub-
lications 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 me-
dia 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 Rus-
sian-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 cre-
ated or used to bring “news.” Hence they “buried” many important develop-
ments, 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 non-
Jewish victims of the Nazis and their allies. For example, the invader delib-
erately 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. Hav-
ing 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 Kras-
naia 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 extermi-
nation 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 So-
bibór, 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 domes-
tic 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 posi-
tioning 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 lis-
teners wanted to know, they were able to find references to a campaign of
mass murder specifically directed against the Jews. Indeed, anecdotal evi-
dence 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 politi-
cally worthless.
A major part of the tentative answer to the question should be antisemi-
tism, both within the Central Committee and as a mindset among Soviet
citizens. It has left a small but revealing trail in contemporary archival doc-
uments 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 bar-
ring 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 Alek-
sandr Aleksandrovich Fadeev as chair of the Writers’ Union by listing “po-
litically dubious” employees of the newspaper Literatura i iskusstvo, most of
them had Jewish names.168 Jews continued to be barred from diplomatic ser-
vice, 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 dis-
missal 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 Janu-
ary 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 Aleksan-
drov was an important exponent of Russian chauvinism.174 There are vari-
ous 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 Malen-
kov, 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 offend-
ers as Jews.177 In 1947, he wrote to another leading official, Andrei Aleksan-
drovich 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 oppo-
nent of the ‘over-emphasizing’ of the Jewish theme in the propaganda,” and
even explains, unconvincingly, the long references to Jews in the Extraordi-
nary 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, believ-
ing 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 Sep-
tember 1941.184 Reports of the perception that only Jews were threatened, of-
ten 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 Alexan-
der Dovzhenko and, apparently, many other writers were furious that Soviet
Ukraine’s Writers’ Union was headed by the Jewish-Ukrainian novelist Na-
tan 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 citi-
zens 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 journal-
ists. 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 re-
cord, 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 An-
other is the nature of the public reporting, which, as argued here, never omit-
ted 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 investiga-
tion into the social history of scholarship during World War II. A prelimi-
nary 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 En-
terprises, 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 histo-
rians most likely occurred because six of its ten titular members were acade-
micians 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 Ex-
traordinary 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 com-
mission 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 prison-
ers of war.6
The following account of the creation of the Extraordinary State Com-
mission, therefore, emerged from a search for basic answers about a virtu-
ally 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 in-
vestigation 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 na-
tional-level public investigations was equally undistinguished in both the
Russian empire and the USSR. In states with hierarchically stratified im-
perial bureaucracies, such initiatives almost always threatened to backfire
against the authorities themselves. Motivated by the instinct of self-preserva-
tion, 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, Rus-
sian 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 in-
dependent 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 cen-
tury, as Russian civil society became more assertive and as warfare—from
bilateral wars to world war and civil war—shook the country on an unprec-
edented 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 South-
ern 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 arrange-
ments, all these commissions had a common fate: the huge collection of
documentary materials they amassed never became a subject of broad pub-
lic discussion in Russia, and the publications they prepared based on these
materials were never released to the public.8 More accurately, the public it-
self 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 re-
cent 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 mert-
vye), the eternal flame (vechnyi ogon´), the victorious people (narod-pobedi-
tel´), 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 im-
portant 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 No-
vember 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 re-
gions 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 interro-
gations 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 Nurem-
berg (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, Ex-
traordinary 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 cre-
ation, 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, representa-
tives 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 Extraor-
dinary 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 ar-
chives, which contain the fondy for the local auxiliary commissions of the
Extraordinary State Commission, may also contribute many new and impor-
tant 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 Ex-
traordinary 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 Accom-

plices 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 imple-
mentation of Soviet Cold War ideology.
For instance, why did the Soviet government even need the Extraor-
dinary State Commission? It already had the Soviet Information Bureau
(Sovinformbiuro) and TASS for purposes of propaganda and counterpropa-
ganda. 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 Com-
missariat 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 pur-
poses, 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 of-
ficial 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 docu-
ment—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 com-
mission, 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 an-
alyzed the preparations for the Extraordinary State Commission reports on
the Holocaust in occupied Soviet territories, confirmed that some of the in-
formation 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 Aca-
demician Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko, was assigned the dual role of official
mouthpiece of the Soviet counterpropagandists, on the one hand, and in-
dependent 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 ex-
ecutions 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 wide-
spread 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 prob-
lems of restitution. Using the Extraordinary State Commission materials
without a clear understanding of the true reasons for the commission’s ex-
istence 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 Sov-
informbiuro), 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 pro-
ceedings in certain cases through interrogation of the victims, and in pub-
lishing 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 fig-
ures and representatives from the spheres of culture, academics, and law. The
Soviet committee, said Khavinson, must similarly include world-famous So-
viet scholars, legal experts, doctors, writers, Red Cross activists, and so forth,
whose authority and reputation would guarantee in the eyes of the interna-
tional public that the future committee would be independent in its evalua-
tions, 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 Pro-
paganda (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 difficul-
ties 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 counter-
propaganda 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 under-
stand the forces they faced. During the first year of the war, the Sovinform-
biuro 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 Solo-
mon Abramovich Lozovskii.36
In contrast to the propagandists, the main focus of the Soviet foreign pol-
icy 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 in-
cluded a proposal to create two secret preparatory commissions: a financial-
economic 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 ter-
minology), 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 Ko-
sygin.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 juris-
diction. 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 represen-
tatives 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, ide-
ological, 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 Ger-
man 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 So-
viet Territories and for a Tallying of the Damage Caused by the German Fas-
cist Troops to the Population of the USSR and to the Soviet State.44
The commission’s powers in the field of war-crimes investigation essen-
tially duplicated those from Khavinson’s old proposals, but the organiza-
tion 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 Be-
lorussian 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 com-
missars 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 per-
sonnel 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 doc-
umentary 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 post-
war 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, or-
ganic, 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 cen-
tralization 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 Atroci-
ties, Destruction, Robbery, and Violence Committed by the German Author-
ities 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 Bu-
reau 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, sup-
ported 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 suf-
fice 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 ambas-
sador to the United States (1939–41) and current member of the Collegium of
the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (NKID), Konstantin Aleksan-
drovich 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 Aleksan-
drov, Umanskii, and Aleksei Fedorovich sign a third proposal for the cre-
ation 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 Ac-
complices 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 So-
viet nomenklatura even greater representation on the commission (35 mem-
bers) but also included a number of public figures.52
But while Soviet officials were drafting the future institution, U.S. Pres-
ident Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Lord Chancellor John Simon
issued a joint statement on 7 October 1942, declaring their readiness to co-
operate 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 Commis-
sar 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 pro-
posal that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issue a special decree creat-
ing 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 Vyshin-
skii, who, judging from subsequent events, seems to have given his approval.
When, at the very end of October, the Aleksandrov-Umanskii draft plan fi-
nally reached Molotov’s desk, Molotov made some corrections to it along the
lines suggested in Lozinskii’s proposal. The “committee” became a “commis-
sion,” and “calculation” became “establishment and investigation”; collective
 people and procedures 131

farms augmented the commission’s purview; and the phrase “and their ac-
complices” 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 him-
self.58 On 30–31 October, Molotov met with Stalin.59 Two days later, on 2 No-
vember 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 su-
perficially imitating their attributes and conforming to Western public opin-
ion 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 be-
yond 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 Extraor-
dinary 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 special-
izing 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 Commis-
sion 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 Ste-
panovna 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 Vik-

torovich 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 Tol-
stoi (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 opportuni-
ties 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 middle-
school 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 ap-
peared 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 cho-
sen because of their absolute personal devotion to the country’s supreme
leader, as well as the equally important fact that they had proven that devo-
tion. 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 person-
ally treated Stalin, members of the Politburo and the government, and Co-
mintern 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 stu-
dent 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 dif-
ficulty 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 doc-
tor 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 Administra-
tion and opened the first international routes to Berlin. In the war years,
Grizodubova’s agency was responsible for fulfilling a special government or-
der on flights to foreign countries. In addition to directing the long-distance
aviation group that took care of special orders for supplying partisan divi-
sions, 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 Glavrep-
ertkom), then introduced order into the administration of the Sovkino film
agency (1926–30) and the Communist Academy’s Institute of Soviet Con-
struction 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 in-
ternational law, his true role—that of the de facto party commissar for schol-
arship—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 de-
spite his lack of party affiliation he was recruited to join various experts’
committees in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, where he ex-
amined significant foreign policy questions for the Stalinist regime.70 At the
same time, an event occurred in Tarle’s life that largely determined his sub-
sequent 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 All-
Union Congress of Collective-Farm Shock Workers, decisively paved the way
for the long and dizzying career of Trofim Lysenko—academician of the So-
viet Academy of Sciences (1939), president of the All-Union Academy of Ag-
ricultural 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 at-
titude toward the Bolsheviks and even cooperated with the propaganda bu-
reau 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 land-
marks,” 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 privi-
leges available to Soviet writers.72
In the 1920s, while still the bishop of Peterhof, Nikolai was repeatedly ar-
rested 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 patriarch-
ate 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 mem-
bers, their absolute loyalty to the Stalinist regime was guaranteed by a tried-
and-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 face-
less Shvernik a faithful guardian of the most hidden state secrets. Not coin-
cidentally, 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 re-
sponsible for one department (otdel). Trainin led the department that calcu-
lated 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 para-
phernalia.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 ex-
perts 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 proto-
cols of the Extraordinary State Commission show, in practice the commis-
sion 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 (de-
partment 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 ca-
reerists: 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 multi-
layered 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 repub-
lic, 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 commit-
tee, plus the heads of the corresponding local Council of People’s Commis-
sars 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 commis-
sion 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 Extraor-
dinary State Commission.”81 On 19 March, Pavel I. Bogoiavlenskii was con-
firmed 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 con-
cern over the political implications of Katyn and the urgent need for a tough
response—combined with the need to restore economic, political, and ideo-
logical control over territories that had either already been or were in the
process of being freed.83 The Extraordinary State Commission reports pub-
lished 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 (testi-
monies, statements, etc.) sent to headquarters by the local auxiliary commis-
sions 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 Alek-
sandrov 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 experi-
enced 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 unoffi-
cial chief editor and censor of its reports.87 Shvernik and Aleksandrov under-
stood 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 ex-
plained 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 Commis-
sion?), 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 re-
mained 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 Sh-
vernik 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 intel-
ligentsia 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 shortcom-
ing and then allow it to be printed.”90 His boss immediately agreed and re-
turned the document to Shvernik for further revision; only after Vyshinskii
gave his final approval on 2 September did the Extraordinary State Commis-
sion vote to permit the publication of the report.91
At the same time, Stalin’s former public prosecutor did not hesitate to fal-
sify 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 immedi-
ate 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 com-
posed of permanent commission experts Burdenko, V. I. Prozorovskii, V. M.
Smol´ianinov, P. S. Semenovskii, and M. D. Shvaikova.94 The original testi-
mony 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 bod-
ies with bullet wounds and with injuries caused by blunt, hard, and heavy ob-
jects 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 scientific-
sounding “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 foren-
sic, 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 fin-
ished 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 propa-
ganda spin was shared by all members of the Extraordinary State Commis-
sion, 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 pre-
amble 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 Com-
mission 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 col-
leagues frankly that the government had to have at its disposal something
more substantial than statistics on the loss of 300,000 chickens. “Our com-
mission 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 in-
formation 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” in-
formation. 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 in-
flated 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 in-
triguing topic for future investigation.
The Extraordinary State Commission was abolished by order of the So-
viet 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 Nonethe-
less, 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 con-
duct 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 Extraor-
dinary 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 excavat-
ing 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, Pe-

tru Lupan, like many other locals, was immediately drafted into the So-
viet army.1 The 27-year-old Moldovan quickly deserted the military and went
into hiding, perhaps not interested in fighting for his newly acquired father-
land. 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 popu-
lation and Soviet activists”—fell victim to the massacre at Cepeleuți.3
According to the first minutes of Lupan’s interrogation, dated 16 Septem-
ber 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. View-
ing 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 prob-
lems that Soviet documents pose as primary sources. They warned of vari-
ous obstacles set up by an indoctrinated, centralized, secretive machine that
produced immense but often confusing and misleading paperwork. The re-
liability 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 interroga-
tion records as truthful sources on committed crimes. Studies of Stalinist re-
pression 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 ma-
nipulation, 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, dur-
ing 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 pro-
duced 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 investiga-

tion 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 re-
main 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 Washing-
ton, 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 So-
viet territories, these documents could be of remarkable value, if the infor-
mation they contain is deemed credible.10
Scholars have a particular interest in many related issues—including ci-
vilian violence against the Jewish population, the dynamics surrounding col-
laboration, the involvement of local auxiliaries in the mass murder of Jews,
and the functioning of indigenous administrative units in anti-Jewish poli-
cies.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 un-
derstanding 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 collabora-
tors, 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 east-
ern 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 col-
laboration. She asserts that “the entire question of anti-Semitic attitudes was
ignored in the trials,” and even the word “antisemitism” was not once men-
tioned (unfortunately, she fails to indicate in the article how many files she
reviewed).16 Penter attributes this neglectful attitude to the regime’s ambiva-
lence 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 post-
war 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 popula-
tion 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 Lu-
pan’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 re-
sponse 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 rel-
evant 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 Documen-
tation 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 Ro-
manian 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 Dor-
fman, 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 chil-
dren 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 investi-
gated 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 infor-
mation about a massacre committed in the village of Scăieni. The NKVD
files contain records of Andrei Racu and Efim Stratu. These two locals al-
legedly 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 con-
voying 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 giv-
ing 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 un-
bearable 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 eyewit-
ness 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 refer-
ring 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 be-
fore 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 pre-
pared 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 simi-
lar in both groups of analyzed sources. In addition, Cărăuş mentioned that
another villager from Scăieni—Anton Racu—was also involved in the kill-
ings 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 mas-
sacre 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 Ro-
manian 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 de-
fendant Ivan Sadovei present a stark personal admission of guilt in the Pep-
eni 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, hop-
ing 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 eas-
ily 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 pro-
vided by the NKVD files, we nevertheless need to avoid stretching this con-
clusion 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 tri-
als 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 depart-
ments during the postwar period, based on Ukrainian collections of post-
war 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 ex-
periment 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 de-
nial of participation in murder, he could call an astonishing number of wit-
nesses. In the case of Timofei Gheorghilaș, accused of killing and robbing
Jews in Dumbrăveni during a pogrom organized by gentiles from neighbor-
ing 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 interro-
gation. 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 de-

clared 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 vil-
lagers 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 ques-
tionable. 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. Never-
theless, 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 con-
firm 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 defen-
dant and release him due to insufficient proof. This happened to Casian Fru-
mos, 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 judi-
ciary, 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 eas-
ily 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 con-
ceal their participation in these crimes during the summer of 1941. They mur-
dered 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 con-
voluted and time-consuming investigations, since crucial information was
available on the surface, and eyewitnesses to crimes abounded. Most prob-
ably, 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 dif-
ferent 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 po-
litical 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 re-
sult, 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 in-
tended to punish those regarded as having collaborated with Romanian and
Nazi forces and to reestablish Soviet order in these territories. An impor-
tant 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 mur-

dering 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 ac-
cused of robbing Jews in the town of Rezina was caught hiding numerous ob-
jects—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 of-
fense 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 interroga-
tions. 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 poli-
tics. 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 in-
terwar 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 na-
tionalist 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 tak-
ing 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 demon-
strators 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. Unfor-
tunately, 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, histori-
ans 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 dis-
cusses 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 pri-
marily 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 implementa-
tion of communism in Bessarabia with the postwar years, but not with 1940.
Bessarabian interviewees proved quick to identify the brutality of the So-
viet 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 compari-
son 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 partici-
pation 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, gendar-
merie, police, and various civil servants employed bribes to encourage lo-
cals 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 popula-
tion 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 con-
cert. 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 commu-
nity. 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 Konstanti-
novici 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 per-
sonal 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 mar-
ried with children. Ethnic Moldovans made up the majority, while a minor-
ity 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 (ne-
gramotnyi). 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 overpopula-
tion, while only 38.1 percent of Bessarabians were literate in 1930, the individ-
uals 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 im-
plosion 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 sta-
sis.”4 Although terms like these describe one important aspect of what hap-
pened, 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 simpli-
fied 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, permit-
ted—Soviet discourse in and about the city of Lviv in western Ukraine. At
158
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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, compet-
ing nationalisms, empires, totalitarianisms, and mass state violence—includ-
ing 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 Esto-
nia, 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 So-
viet hegemony but were not annexed to the Soviet Union provides an impor-
tant 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 commemo-
ration 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 dif-
ferent ways—another important aspect), but the Baltic states now belong
to the EU, whereas western Ukraine does not. Poland was a satellite; west-
ern 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 chal-
lenges are mutual, with Western Europe’s historical narratives and imagina-
tive 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.
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In addition to Soviet discourse, I discuss two other official or quasi-

official 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 defen-
siveness 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 amne-
sia, however, and the Soviet legacy had more complex effects than Hrytsak
recognizes.
The effects of official discourse cannot be reduced to a literal transmis-
sion of fully articulated messages to captive audiences. Official discourse was
both crucial and ubiquitous. For most of the period under discussion, it en-
joyed 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 par-
ticipation 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 expe-
rienced, 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 re-
writing 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 pro-
ductions 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 tra-
ditions and with other authoritarian narratives, including those of Ukrai-
nian 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 be-
tween “locals” from Lviv or western Ukraine and “easterners”—those arriv-
ing 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 re-
ception. 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 com-
mon 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
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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 Mid-
dle 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, communi-
ties that most shaped the city were Roman Catholics/Poles, Jews, and Ortho-
dox Christian (mostly Uniate) Ukrainians.15
After its founding in the thirteenth century, Lviv soon came under Pol-
ish 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 vio-
lent end. In Lviv, the Holocaust meant the murder and plunder of the Jew-
ish 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 politi-
cally 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 cen-
turies, 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 Holo-
caust 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 suf-
fering and killing of Jews. With some exceptions, “Soviet audiences,” as Zvi
Gitelman has found, were “generally not exposed to even the most elemen-
tary details of the Holocaust.”18
Soviet discourse suppressed the Nazi regime’s targeting of Jews with ex-
traordinary comprehensiveness. It submerged Jewish suffering in a narrative
of general Nazi racism, regarded as an aspect of fascism—in its Marxist in-
terpretation, 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 becom-
ing the main legitimacy myth of the postwar Soviet Union.20 Studies of post-
Soviet Holocaust memory in specific parts of the Soviet west have also
stressed the view that the Soviets influenced this memory mostly or even ex-
clusively 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 citi-
zens 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 un-
derlined 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 quar-
ter 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 ef-
fect, intended and unintended messages did not contradict but reinforced
each other. By inadvertently spreading some information about the murder
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of Jews while signaling that this was not an important issue, the trials con-
firmed the inferior place accorded to the Holocaust.
In his chapter, Karel Berkhoff shows that, during the war, “explicit re-
ports” on the German assault on the Jews “did exist and were more numer-
ous 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 recogni-
tion. Major Soviet publications on World War II in Lviv show that Soviet
discourse was consistently distorted but not static. Its depiction of Lviv’s Ya-
nivska (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 pur-
pose—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 Ger-
mans 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. Pub-
lished in the city’s Ukrainian-language newspaper Vil´na Ukraina on 19 Au-
gust 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 Ya-
nivska had also served as a collection point for manhunts targeting Ukraini-
ans 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 Trag-
edy 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 ar-
ticle 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 (here-
after the Extraordinary State Commission). This article constituted an es-
pecially authoritarian and authoritative, though not the last, word on the
issue.30
It described Yanivska and gave details about some perpetrators, their sa-
dism 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 impor-
tant 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 as-
signed 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
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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 dur-
ing 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 prevail-
ing Soviet tendency to marginalize the Holocaust as a crime particularly tar-
geting 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 au-
thor 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 Shkan-
drij 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 occu-
pation, not by nationality or religion. One purpose of the report, apparently,
was to refute the evidence of massacres committed by the People’s Commis-
sariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in Lviv before the Germans arrived. It de-
cried 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 ste-
reotype 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 per-
petrators. At the same time, it excised the German and Ukrainian-national-
ist 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 occu-
piers 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 antagonis-
tic 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 quasi-
official alternatives to Soviet discourse. German antisemitic propaganda was
relentless and ongoing, and Ukrainian nationalists continued to spread an-
tisemitic stereotypes even after the Germans left.45 Official Ukrainian publi-
cations 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 accusa-
tions . . . with Nazi antisemitic tropes,” identifying Jews as the “most impor-
tant 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 “ultrabes-
tial.” Even though the Home Army noted in 1942, at the peak of German de-
portations and killings, that the open brutality of German manhunts elicited
some pity for their Jewish victims even from non-Jews who were hostile to
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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 German-
controlled Ukrainian-language daily, maintained high print runs through-
out 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 re-
acted 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 eco-
nomic exploitation and centuries of failed Ukrainian urbanization.48
There was no sharp dividing line between taking advantage of opportuni-
ties 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 “Jew-
ish World Pestilence” and a comprehensive advertising campaign through
posters, leaflets, loudspeakers, and cinemas.50 Illustrating the fantastic na-
ture 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 con-
ducted 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 wel-
comed 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 Ger-
man authorities quickly suppressed this initiative and arrested several key
leaders. The Germans forced the OUN-B to abandon its pro-German orien-
tation, 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 [en-
gaging 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 So-
viets 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 al-
ready 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 In-
surgent 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-Com-
mune” 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 battal-
ions—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 sig-
nificant 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 prac-
tice—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 mutu-
ally hostile projects.
In warning Ukrainians not to be killed “like Jews” by Soviet forces,
Ukrainian nationalists conveyed several significant points. First, they de-
scribed Jews not simply as victims but as, to some extent, guilty for not hav-
ing resisted. Second, they denied the exceptionality of what had happened
to the Jews by arguing that the Bolsheviks would do the same to Ukraini-
ans. 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 collabo-
rated—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 perti-
nent characteristic is its aggressive if implied insistence that the mass murder
of the Jews did not matter. The continued use of the Judeo-Bolshevism ste-
reotype 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 mo-
mentous 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 “Jew-
ish 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 neces-
sary 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 So-
viet officials made public statements that accused the Germans of intend-
ing 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 Ukrai-
nian 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 oper-
ated. 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 Pol-
ish 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 pub-
lished—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 Ger-
man slavery.” Although the figures were inconsistent and the number of vic-
tims at Yanivska included those who had been taken to Belzec and murdered
there, the general picture was clear enough, even though it obscured the vic-
tims’ 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 pol-
icy.”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 mem-
bership 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 non-
Germans 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 po-
groms.” 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 per-
petrators remained marginal. Moreover, other local producers of representa-
tions 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 phras-
ing. Both texts contained detailed descriptions of German Aktionen: indi-
vidual instances of atrocities and killings, the mass murder of Soviet POWs,
Yanivska, the ghetto, and the death brigade. Both texts quoted many wit-
nesses, 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 extermi-
nation.” 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 ex-
plain 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 mur-
der of two rabbis at Yanivska in a section on atrocities committed against
clergy. It mentioned the “mass extermination of children,” targeting “espe-
cially 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 mur-
dered 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 some-
times showed a different pattern, employing the categories of “peaceful pop-
ulation” and Jewish victims in a specific manner. If later Soviet discourse was
built on an implicit dichotomy between them, these early local texts some-
times 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 concomi-
tant 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 state-
ment 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 chronologi-
cal 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 national-
ists—killing Jews.80
The middle section of the Sokal report consisted of three pages of de-
tails 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 eyewit-
ness 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 iden-
tity. 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 exter-
minating 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 intellec-

tuals and Soviet party and state representatives. Yet a ringing statement on
the Soviet return (victory) and retribution was quoted only once—as com-
ing 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 catego-
ries of victims, such as the intelligentsia or the party-state’s representatives,
were absent. The only mention of those sent to Germany for labor exploita-
tion was in the final summary and the only explicit mention of a non-Jew oc-
curred 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 nar-
rative 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 de-
cades 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 Com-
mittee Chairman Ivan Hrushetskyi denounced Barvinskyi for hiding
anti-Soviet attitudes: Barvinskyi had publicly welcomed the Germans as lib-
erators from the “Bolshevik yoke,” called on Ukrainians to support the na-
tionalists, 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 So-
viet 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 intel-
ligentsia.93 Barvinskyi was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment, five years
of deprivation of rights, and confiscation of property.94 The trial also pro-
duced fresh accusations against his wife and his brother.
The significance of the Barvinskyi trial for Soviet discourse on the Ho-
locaust 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, na-
tionalists, 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 Ger-
mans’ 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. Ac-
cording 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 suf-
fering” 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 re-
turned to Ukraine and was allowed to resume his writing career. Except for
some minor ideological difficulties over an early postwar work featuring na-
tionalist resistance in western Ukraine, he thrived once more, freely invent-
ing incidents of communist resistance in German-occupied Lviv.97
Myhal was perhaps the single most productive local Soviet author writ-
ing about the German occupation of Lviv. He was certainly second to none
among the small group publishing on the topic. His writing showed intrigu-
ing 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 non-
Jews, 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 tar-
geted 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 as-
sertion that to die without fighting was a disgrace.
Myhal presented the Judenrat as essentially similar to Ukrainian col-
laboration organizations. In this view, the Germans had abused Jews and
non-Jews in the same way. Any differences were only a “matter of time—ev-
erywhere 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 Ukrai-
nian 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 perpetra-
tors 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 kill-
ing 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 be-
tween often but not always lethal concentration camps and specialized death
camps. Myhal also equated Nazi camps, including Auschwitz, with contem-
porary 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. Accord-
ing to the Lviv oblast committee, reporters came from both local and cen-
tral newspapers. Most of the trial proceedings were filmed.105 Vil´na Ukraina
published several major articles on the trial. In October 1966, Ivan Fedo-
renko 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 inva-
sion 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 half-
truth, 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 inci-
dental 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 perpe-
trators 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 quar-
ters 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 as-
serted 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 simi-
lar 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 em-
phasized 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 sup-
plied 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 Weliczker-
Wells. 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 motiva-
tion 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 . . . quali-
ties.”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 deliber-
ate nature and thereby asserting that it was legitimate, even obligatory. This
was a silence that made itself heard. It also established a specific relation-
ship between the author’s knowledge and public statement and his readers’
knowledge and reception. Such an offhand reference to the mass extermina-
tion of the Jews revealed that extermination to be shared or common knowl-
edge, 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 mobi-
lization 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 Ro-
man 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 propa-
ganda campaign against Zionism. Thus, for 1978–79, a Lviv oblast KGB re-
port 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 op-
pression of Ukrainians and with “collaboration in the . . . mass extermina-
tion of the Jewish population of western Ukraine.” In passing, the authors
sought to demonstrate the strong presence of Jews among pre-Soviet exploit-
ers 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 inver-
sion with another conditional rediscovery. Whereas Soviet discourse rarely
acknowledged the Jewish past of western Ukraine, Brodskii and Shulmeis-
ter 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. Ret-
rospective attempts to distinguish among Nazi victims were no better than
what the fascists had done.
Brodskii and Shulmeister established their own differences. Two collabo-
rators inside the camp, Kampf and Tsimmerman, were described as Zion-
ists.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 col-
laborators 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 accusa-
tions 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 antise-
mitically 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 recon-
ciled not only with communism but with the mythology of the Great Patri-
otic 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 dis-
course 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 dis-
course ostentatiously aimed at an equality of victimhood while in fact treat-
ing 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 Ho-
locaust 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 dis-
course 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 So-
viet 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 state-
ments—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 an-
alyze the inconsistent treatment of the Holocaust in Soviet media and inter-
nal reports during the war (Amar, Asher, Berkhoff, Sorokina). Both subjects
deal with perceptions and presentations of history, as well as their present-
day consequences. The detailed studies in this book draw on previously un-
known archival sources to illustrate how the general population perceived
Jews and how authorities based their policies at least partly on their assess-
ments of those perceptions. These assessments were used to incite or deter
action.
Jewish survivors often remarked, with bitterness, on non-German or lo-
cal participation in the murder of Jews during World War II. One could of-
ten 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 neigh-
bors, 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 internation-
alism. 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 suffer-
ing of the Belarusian people and their resistance and seems to pay little atten-
tion 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 lo-
cal complicity in the Holocaust is that most of the Jewish testimonies and
memoirs were given or written in Yiddish or Hebrew and so were inacces-
sible to many Western scholars. John-Paul Himka observes in his introduc-
tion 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 stud-
ies” 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 expe-
rience 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 his-
tory. 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 Eu-
ropean 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 argu-
ment 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 politi-
cal behavior. This would seem blatantly obvious. Yet few graduate students
working in Jewish studies choose some aspect of the Holocaust for their dis-
sertation 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 stud-
ies. 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 use-
ful 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 Du-

mitru, and Vladimir Solonari show that the motivations of neighbors who
robbed and killed Jews were quite varied. Marci Shore asks “how to appor-
tion 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 antisemi-
tism 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 collab-
oration 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 hu-
manitarian considerations but on political calculations. But what those cal-
culations 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 kill-
ing 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 guide-
lines, 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 docu-
ments talked about the total destruction by the Nazis of the Jewish popula-
tion 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 ar-
rived at liberated areas before the branches of the Extraordinary State Com-
mission 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 patrio-
tism and heroism. Asher speculates that “analogies between the Nazi depor-
tation 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 anti-
semitic and may have been motivated by their feelings. Larger considerations
might also explain the inconsistencies in Soviet publications and public an-
nouncements 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 cal-
culations 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 atroci-
ties against Soviet civilians became known (ca. 18,000,000 civilian deaths),
the enormity of the atrocities against Jews paled somewhat. In Western Eu-
rope 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 Holo-
caust, 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 illus-
tration, 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 refer-
ence 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 consign-
ment 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, reso-
nant 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 incon-
sistent, seemingly ambivalent attitudes and policies of the greatest enemy of
the Nazis toward the Nazis’ greatest victim? The authors do not provide de-
finitive 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 (Bloom-
ington: 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 Internalist-
Structuralist 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: Explora-
tions in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 2 (2000): 306–7.
6. Michael David-Fox, “The Implications of Transnationalism,” Kritika: Explora-
tions 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: Explora-
tions 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: Explora-
tions 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, Col-
laboration 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 Po-
land, 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 Rela-
tions 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 Engelk-

ing, 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 argu-
ment: 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 Soviet-
occupied 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 Grudzińska-
Gross, War through Children’s Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deporta-
tions, 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 docu-
ments 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 ethni-
cally 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 antysemi-
tyzmu 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 Rzeczy-
pospolitej 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 popula-
tion 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 ne-
metsko-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 Anti-
Fascist 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 (Blooming-
ton: 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: Continu-
ity 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, com-
mander 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 Cherno-
vitskii 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 Ro-
manians 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 parliamen-
tary 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 eyewit-
nesses (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 (Roma-
nian 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 Com-
missar 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 disap-
peared 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, Lipkan-
skii, 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 Nether-
lands 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 Univer-
sity 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 Vinogra-
dova (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 Janu-
ary 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 [Intelli-
gence] Upravlenie NKVD SSSR to Shcherbakov, “O polozhenii v raionakh, okkupirovan-
nykh 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 Shcherba-
kov 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 povsemes-
tnykh 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: Chudovishch-
nyi 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 chudov-
ishchnykh 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 Spätstalinis-
mus 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, posviashchen-
nom 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 zakhvat-

chikami 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—prob-
ably 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 voen-
nogo 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 zakhvat-
chikov 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 Sotsialis-
ticheskoi 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 Solu-
tion 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, “Rassle-
dovanie nemetsko-fashistskikh zlodeianii v Liubline,” Izvestiia, 19 August 1944, 4; TASS,
“Zasedanie Chrezvychainoi pol´sko-sovetskoi komissii po rassledovaniiu nemetsko-
fashistskikh 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 zlo-
deianii 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 za-
dachakh ‘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, Gosudarst-
vennyi 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 preach-
ing 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 Forma-
tion 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 prestuple-
nii,” 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 Shcherba-
kov’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, Gosudarstven-
nyi 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 (Balti-
more: 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 documenta-
tion 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 Knowl-
edge: 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 confirma-
tion 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 pub-
lished 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 arkh-
ivy, 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 geroi-
cheskoi bor´be trudiashchikhsia Leningrada v 1941–1944 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1966).
15. Now the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii gosudarstven-
nyi 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´: Plen-
niki 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 Sci-
ences (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 influ-
ence 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 in-
formation 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), Rimskii-
Korsakov, 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 commis-
sion’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 academi-
cian 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 Commis-
sion”), 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 Architec-
ture, 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 educa-
tion 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’ Com-
mittee, Academician Derzhavin; the chairman of the Pan-Slav Committee, Lieutenant-
General 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 highest-
ranking 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—os-
novatel´ 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, Pokhish-
chennye 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 Commis-
sion 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 psy-
chological 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 investiga-

tions, 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 powerless-
ness 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, Doc-
tors 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. Kras-
nushkin, “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 sudebno-
meditsinskoi 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 Nurem-
berg”: 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 politiches-
koi 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 rassledo-
vaniiu 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 popula-
tion 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–Decem-
ber 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 Konstanti-
novici 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 “counter-
revolutionary,” “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 Bessara-
bians 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 RG-
54.003*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 authori-
ties 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 com-
mitted 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 Nationsbil-
dung 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 Manufac-
turing 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 Interna-
tional 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 Massen-
verbrechens (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: Knizhkovo-
zhurnal´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 responsibil-
ity” 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, Judenverfol-
gung, 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 Discus-
sions 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 antisemi-
tischen 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 vy-
davnycha 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 authorita-
tive,” 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 organiza-
tions 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 conclu-
sively 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 Ya-
nivska 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 inconsis-
tency 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 Com-
mission 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. Barvins-
kim,” 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 Ukrai-
nian 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 inten-
tions, 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 restrict-
ing 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 thorough-
fares; 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 Lega-
cies 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 Uni-

versity 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]).