Commissar Molotov sent four notes to foreign countries between 1941 and 1943, reporting the terrible crimes and atrocities committed by the occupation forces in the Soviet Union. In only one of these did he allude to how the Germans were killing “unarmed defenseless Jewish working people.”60 The emphasis in all four notes, which were also published in the Soviet press, was invariably to underline Nazi victimization of “Soviet citizens,” Red Army prisoners of war, and the deportation of Soviet people to slave labor in Germany. Most commonly, the Kremlin highlighted Nazi eradication policies but without mentioning the Jews or any other nationality.61
On December 17, 1942, the World Jewish Congress finally succeeded in getting the United States, Great Britain, and exiled European governments to issue a denunciation of the “extermination of the Jewish population of Europe.”62 Moscow signed on as well but the next day provided a clarification that there were similar murderous plans for “a considerable part of the civilian population in German-occupied territories, innocent people of different nationalities, different social status, various convictions and beliefs, people of all ages.”63 The Soviets were not alone in backtracking from the specificity and scope of the crimes against the Jews. A New York Times front-page story in early 1943 spoke about the possible fate of “some peoples” to come. In fact, the mass murder was well under way.64
Stalin set the party line on May 1, when he said that Soviet citizens were being deported to Germany for enslavement and were victims of “extermination by the Hitlerite beasts.” On November 6 he made reference to the murder of “hundreds of thousands of our peaceful people.”65 Remarkably, that was one of the very last times he said anything at all about the victims of Nazism. An exception came during a March 1946 interview, when he estimated the total number of all Soviet deaths in the war. He gave it as 7 million, when it was more than three times larger than that.66
During the war, Soviet newspapers provided enough information for anyone to find out more of the truth about the Jews.67 Even if it was not official policy to bury the stories, they tended to fade from sight.
Using the pre-1939 borders of the USSR, an estimated 1 million Soviet Jews lost their lives during the war. They are counted among the total of all civilians and members of the armed forces killed in the war. An additional number of Soviet Jews died in Stalin’s labor camps and prisons; millions of other citizens of the USSR were also killed or perished at the hands of Soviet authorities.68
A glaring example of the Soviet suppression of information about the specific suffering of the Jews pertained to the murder of 33,000 of Kiev’s Jews in September 1941 at Babi Yar.69 The Soviet atrocities commission (ChGK) reported (correctly) that its investigation showed that in reprisal for sabotage in Kiev, the Germans had “called all Jews together, brought them to Babi Yar, and killed them there.” Stalin changed the story to read that “thousands of peaceful Soviet citizens” had been murdered. The trial of fifteen accused killers for Babi Yar in January 1946 heard testimony about a Himmler order to exterminate all the Jews, but in the prosecutor’s closing summary, the phrase was changed to an order to kill “Soviet citizens, Ukrainians.”70 Thousands of people jammed the square for the public hanging of the twelve Germans who were convicted.
The Soviet government sought to track Nazi crimes during the war and used the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), as one of five established in February 1942, to collect material for publication in the West that would foster support for the Soviet Union. Closely watched by the Kremlin, the committee included notable Jewish figures like the writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman. They wrote occasional pieces on the fate of the Jews, but they wanted to do more, as the Red Army began uncovering the extent of the mass murder. The JAFC decided, with the strong support of prominent American Jews, to collect eyewitness testimony and publish it in English as The Black Book. Ehrenburg, Grossman, and others were heavily involved and opted also for a Russian edition. Then, in 1947 when the completed book was already in production, Soviet authorities stopped the presses and ordered the printing plates destroyed.
Gregory Alexandrov, the head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department, reported to Andrei Zhdanov on February 3, 1947, that anyone reading the book would be “misled” into thinking “that the Germans looted and destroyed only the Jews.” The study conveyed the false impression “that the Germans fought against the Soviet Union only to destroy the Jews.” It was shameful, he thought, to report that the Jews in mixed marriages were killed and that their non-Jewish spouses were often spared, or that Jews who concealed their identity as Russians or Ukrainians were not executed. Alexandrov was particularly upset that Grossman’s introduction claimed that killing Jews was a Nazi priority, a contention later shown by historians to be true. The Soviet authorities concluded that the Black Book contained “serious political mistakes” and should not be published. The influential editors appealed to highly respected Solomon Mikhoels to intercede, but with no luck.71 Nevertheless, a manuscript of the book survived and was smuggled out and given to Ehrenburg’s daughter in January 1992. The first uncensored Russian edition finally appeared in 1993.72
In the battle over the memory and significance of the war, Stalin and his experts opted to erase any notion of a “distinct Jewish catastrophe” and to emphasize instead the universal suffering of the Soviet people. There was no room for commentary on what happened to any particular nation and certainly not the Jews.73 Until 1948 it was still possible to mention their murder at least in the indictments of war criminals in the Soviet Union, but from that point on, Stalin’s orders were that there be only silence.74 That year the JAFC was dissolved, Stalin had Mikhoels murdered, and key members of the committee were arrested, as official anti-Semitism accelerated.75
Those who served on the Soviet atrocity commission (ChGK) did not need much prodding as to what crimes should be uncovered and publicized. Jews are mentioned in some of their reports, but nearly always the victims are referred to as Soviet citizens. Russian historian Marina Sorokina notes that the commissioners “understood perfectly well what the authorities expected.” For example, writer Aleksei Tolstoy, one of its prominent members, said that from June to August 1943 he “personally established” what happened in Stavropol under the Nazis. In fact, the NKVD investigated and wrote the report, which is still in the files, and relates that the entire Jewish population had been slaughtered. In Tolstoy’s version, however, the victims are called “Soviet people,” “Soviet children,” and “Soviet citizens.”
The attitude of the commission was that the documents and their accuracy could be left for the future. In the here and now of the times, their leaders in Moscow needed “detailed material that lends itself to more general conclusions,” in order to promote Soviet claims in the international arena.76
The silence on the persecution of the Jews is particularly disturbing in that so much of the Holocaust played out inside the Soviet Union and involved its citizens directly. There was plenty of evidence of Soviet citizens who collaborated specifically in the mass murder of the Jews. On July 25, 1941, Heinrich Himmler ordered the creation of “additional protective units from the ethnic groups suitable to us” into what became police auxiliary forces, or Schutzmannschaften. By late 1941, 33,000 had volunteered, many of them from the Soviet Union. Using conscription as well, the Germans recruited ten times that number within the year.77