The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses

281 Pages·2014·1.506 MB·English

by  Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, Alexander M. Martin

THE HOLOCAUST IN THE EAST
Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies
Jonathan Harris, Editor
Kritika Historical Studies
The Holocaust in the East
LOCAL PERPETRATORS AND
SOVIET RESPONSES
Edited by MICHAEL DAVID-FOX, PETER HOLQUIST,
and ALEXANDER M. MARTIN
University of Pittsburgh Press
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2014, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses / edited by Michael 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