As the countries of the former Soviet bloc grapple with their past, they often import Soviet narratives into their, usually very anti-Soviet, national histories. This is especially true when it comes to the representations of the Holocaust, where silence and officially driven amnesia predominate. Formed during the Soviet period, the narrative avoided using the word Holocaust and the memorials dedicated to victims of mass murder throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe listed them as “peaceful citizens” rather than Jews. But when and how was this narrative formed, and why was it expedient for the Soviet regime to marginalize the Holocaust—one of the most momentous events in the history of World War II and the greatest catastrophe in the history of the Jewish people? It has been long claimed that the Soviet regime actively obscured the Nazis’ murderous actions against Jews. As with everything else in history, the full story is in fact much more nuanced.

Initially, the Nazi persecution of Jews was actively reported in the Soviet mass media. In fact, the Soviets depicted the first stages of the Holocaust ahead of everyone else with the films Professor Mamlock and The Oppenheim Family. Both were released in 1938 and for some time dismissed in the West as “Soviet Jewish propaganda.”

Though the reportage shrunk considerably after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—the Soviet-German nonaggression treaty—in 1939, it never disappeared completely from the Soviet media sphere. Stories about anti-Jewish atrocities reappeared almost immediately after the Axis invasion of the USSR. By mid-autumn, Soviet leaders were aware of the massacres and brutalities perpetrated by the invaders throughout the occupied territories. While no special orders were issued to the evacuation authorities to afford preferential treatment to Jews as the Nazis’ main targets, the general public was nonetheless alerted to the massive destruction of Jewish communities, and articles written by the likes of Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, two widely popular writers-turned-war correspondents, spoke of this targeted victimization.

In his speech on November 6, 1941, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin—for the first and last time—specifically mentioned Jews among the Nazis’ victims. He then personally edited a November 16 Pravda article on the massacre of Jews in Odesa by the Romanians, describing it “as one of the biggest mass murders of Jews in history.” Various domestic and international declarations about the extermination of Soviet and European Jewry followed. Army newspapers also featured reports of the mass killings, and there were even discussions among the troops about Jews’ being especially targeted. All this testifies that there was no deliberate policy of silence about the unfolding Holocaust in the Soviet media—at least in the first half of the war—though the reportage was certainly inconsistent.

A shift occurred in mid-1943, however. From then on, the focus on Jews was blurred considerably: the reports became infrequent and vague, and Jewish victims were usually subsumed under ethnically generic terms like “peaceful Soviet citizens,” “defenseless people,” or “women and children.” Stalin started the trend of omission of the words “Jews” and “Jewish,” and it quickly caught on. There were several exceptions to the rule, when publications about Jews did appear post-1943, but these were usually in army newspapers, where they could have a mobilizing effect.

In general, ethnic nomenclature was reserved for non-Soviet European Jews, attacks on whom were mentioned from time to time. Soviet Jews, on the other hand, were treated not as a separate group but as part of a larger category of victims. Very soon, a narrative began to form where the Slavs were the Nazis’ main targets, with the Jews being added at the end of a long list of victimized peoples almost as an afterthought. And it was not just Jewish victims who were being consigned to oblivion. Those actively fighting the enemy at the front or in the resistance movement also did not receive public recognition, at least in the Russian-language media.

In November 1942, Ilya Ehrenburg had been able to publish an article in the military newspaper Red Star in which he focused on Jewish heroes; in 1944, he was informed by an official that there was no need “to mention the heroism of Jewish soldiers in the Red Army,” which was deemed “bragging.” Though Jews constituted a large proportion of the partisan detachments operating in the enemy rear, there was little recognition of their contribution, and purely Jewish partisan groups remained completely unacknowledged. In 1944, Ehrenburg published a collection of letters of Jewish fighters in French; the Russian edition, however, was pulped, and the State Publishing House informed the author: “It’s not 1941 anymore.” If Jewish heroes were mentioned in the official rhetoric, they were almost invariably “inspired by the great Russian people.”

While the Soviet leadership avoided references to Jews in the domestic media, the themes of Jewish resistance and suffering proved to be useful in Moscow’s foreign relations. To score propaganda points in the West and acquire foreign aid, stories featuring Jews were widely publicized in allied countries, mainly by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an organization composed of prominent Jewish public figures. It even undertook a tour of the West in 1943, which inspired huge fundraising campaigns, turning the Holocaust into a propaganda tool.

The Committee’s triumph was short-lived. Upon their return from the West, they saw a gradual curtailment of their work. Their major project, the Black Book, a publication meant to document the Holocaust, faced Soviet authorities’ demands to conceal the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role of local collaborators, whose existence would invalidate the idea of a united Soviet front in the face of the German invasion. The Russian-language publication was called off in 1947 on the basis of its “inexpediency,” to use the official excuse (the English version had been published in New York in 1946). Not long afterward, the Committee itself was disbanded and many of its members executed on the charge of treason, espionage, and Jewish nationalism.

This was the beginning of a widespread suppression of Jewish culture and official discrimination against Jews, accompanied by a policy of silence about the Holocaust. Victimhood was assigned to everyone else except the Jews, local memories of atrocities were excised, museums dealing with the genocide closed, and commemoration sites cleared of all the reference to Jewish victims. After Stalin’s death, the discussion of Jewish wartime suffering and resistance was reopened, and a number of Soviet Holocaust movies were made. Yet, the international situation continued to dictate the narrative: the Six-Day War of 1967 and the re-kindling of anti-Zionist rhetoric precipitated a new purge in memory politics.

This intermittent and selective official reporting can be explained not only by the presence of anti-Semites in the Kremlin, but also by the pragmatism and contingency that governed Soviet decision-making, including when it came to reporting the Holocaust. The Soviet official narrative was arguably based on political calculation.

At first, the Holocaust served as evidence of the vicious beliefs of the invaders, and could be used to great effect in the mobilization drive. As the war dragged on and the situation became more desperate, the Kremlin faced a serious dilemma: How to respond to Nazi propaganda that Jews were the backbone of the Soviet regime? And how to avoid being accused of fighting a “Jewish war”? The leadership were well-aware of the widespread rumors that the Germans were killing only Jews and Communists. So, to keep the fighting spirits up, the information about the Holocaust had to be measured and Jewish victims disguised as “peaceful Soviet citizens.” To single out the plight of the Jews—it was believed—would only play into the hands of Nazi propaganda stirring up antisemitic feelings in the Soviet population.

Even though anti-Semitism was officially banned in the Soviet Union, it was a latent part of everyday life, and it reappeared in full force under the stringencies of wartime. Evacuation in particular contributed to antisemitic sentiments. A large number of evacuees and refugees were Jewish because they had been historically forced to settle in the regions now under enemy assault. Difficult living conditions and high prices quickly turned the locals against the newcomers. So, it is very plausible that the downplaying of the Holocaust was in part a manifestation of entrenched antisemitic views.

The authorities probably also assumed (erroneously) that making Jews invisible in the mass of the Red Army and minimizing the scale of Jewish civilian suffering would stave off ethnic resentment and prevent social unrest. During the war, to maintain morale, the leadership deliberately stoked up patriotic feelings among the many ethnicities that constituted the “Soviet people.” This version of Soviet Patriotism had a strong Russocentric tinge. The leadership could not allow the Holocaust to steal the limelight from the heroism and sacrifice of the constituent people.

One particularly consequential aspect of the desire to portray the unity of the Soviet people had to do with the matter of local collaborators. The genocide in the occupied territories was often carried out with active local participation, but their role was downplayed by the authorities. If a connection between the genocide and local auxiliaries had to be made, they were invariably described as the dregs of society, drunkards and marginal elements—which was not always the case—or nationalists who were now conveniently residing in the West. This was expedient for both the regime and the local population. The latter got off scot-free as the conversation of widespread complicity was suppressed; and the former preserved social harmony—especially since there weren’t many Jews left in these regions who could actively challenge the official narrative.

Revelations about local collaborations would be equivalent to admitting that not only were Soviet citizens afflicted by anti-Semitism, but also that not all of them had been united against the Nazis. Collective patriotism and friendship of peoples were the main components of the carefully constructed war myth. The Soviet Union was a multiethnic country and the regime was anxious to foster a unified Soviet identity. Emphasis on the fate of Jews could detract from the all-union effort and experience, and would make it difficult to legitimize the story of a shared hardship and sacrifice.

To an extent, the authorities’ attitude reflected the reality of the Nazi occupation, characterized by widespread atrocities such as murder of civilians, public executions of those suspected of having links with the partisans, burning of villages together with their inhabitants as a punitive measure, deliberate starvation, terror bombings of cities, and deadly deportations. Altogether, from 7 to 10 million people, including Jews, perished as a result of these actions. The Holocaust was seen as part of the larger phenomenon, and the universalizing Soviet discourse was less about obscuring the genocide than denying the Jews any special victimhood status.

Accepting the fact that the Jews suffered more than anyone else would not only go against the idea of shared hardship, but also grant them a separate identity and thereby undermine several decades of their semi-forced assimilation into the general Soviet population. The Bolshevik way of solving “the Jewish question” was to deny the Jews their identity and religion. This created a paradoxical situation whereby one had an officially assigned “Jewish nationality” but was virtually stripped of national cultural characteristics. Further confusion was created during the war, when the state encouraged ethnic feelings, tolerated religious observance, allowed Yiddish-language publications, and sponsored the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which essentially became the representative body of Soviet Jewry. In the eyes of the regime, these measures were temporary, but the knowledge of the genocide being perpetrated in the occupied territories awakened Jewish national consciousness. Even those young secular Jews who had considered themselves completely assimilated began taking an interest in the culture and traditions of their ancestors, precisely because they came under attack. The Committee’s activities, its admonitions to Jews around the world to stand up to the aggressor, and its attempts to help the Jews inside the country only strengthened the communal feeling, and in some cases, national assertiveness. This was something the regime could not tolerate.

The creation of Israel in 1948 prompted Stalin to put a firm stop to any manifestation of Jewish national revival. During the war, he was happy to court the Zionists in the West to extract financial help. But since the Cold War battlelines had been drawn, and Israel allied itself with the West, Stalin came down hard on potential domestic sympathizers. The disbandment of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the anti-Zionist campaign, the Doctors’ Plot (when many were forced into confessing to non-existent counterrevolutionary crimes), and the removal of Jews from state institutions came in fast succession. In this context, emphasizing of the Holocaust was politically inexpedient.

Therefore, the average Soviet citizen hardly ever got a full picture of the extent of the annihilation of Jews. Though in the beginning of the war the mass murder of Jews in Europe and the Soviet Union was publicly exposed, the reportage dwindled around 1943 and never received anywhere near the prominence it deserved. Instead, Soviet propagandists employed the tactics of omission, substitution, reduction, and universalization. This vacillation between recognition and suppression was prompted by political expediency and the desire to maintain social balance. The memory of the Holocaust was manipulated to serve the regime’s interests; it was never silenced entirely, but neither was it encouraged, creating an atmosphere where victims were neither forgotten nor remembered.

Further Reading

Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin (eds.), The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014)

Kiril Feferman, “Soviet Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR: Documenting the Holocaust,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, 4 (2003): 587-602

Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (Rutgers University Press, 2013)

John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic (eds.), Bringing the Dark Past to Light: the Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (University of Nebraska Press, 2013)

 
Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh (eds.), Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Academic Studies Press, 2014)

Tanja Penter, “Collaboration on Trial: New Source Material on Soviet Postwar Trials against Collaborators,” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (2005): 782–90

Arkadi Zeltser, Erina Megowan, “Differing Views among Red Army Personnel about the Nazi Mass Murder of Jews,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, No.3, (Summer 2014): 563-90

Stalin and the Black Book of Soviet Jewry https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/stalin-and-the-black-book-soviet-jewry