Anti-Semitism persisted in the Soviet Union after the Germans were driven out, even in areas that had seen massive pogroms and that, like Kiev, had witnessed mass murder. Indeed, for Ukraine as a whole, the Soviet authorities reported in September 1944 that following its liberation, there were “severe anti-Semitic manifestations on the part of local population in almost all cities.” These included isolated physical attacks and verbal abuse. The Soviet government was well informed about the persistence of anti-Semitism, but getting citizens to face up to what had happened to the Jews was the furthest thing from Stalin’s mind.78
Why this initiative by Stalin, leader of a major power who formerly did not stand out as particularly anti-Jewish? In the first instance, Stalin’s motives for suppressing the news about the “final solution” were likely connected to military and political concerns. Soviet authorities were aware that the Nazi crusade against “Jewish Bolshevism” hit a responsive chord among many citizens already opposed to the Jews and Communism. In order to mobilize the country behind Stalin, in defense of the motherland, the regime emphasized the message that the Nazis were out to exterminate or enslave all Ukrainians, Russians, and other Slavic peoples.
However, this explanation does not account for the acceleration of Soviet anti-Semitism in the postwar period. My hypothesis is that Stalin, the supreme commander and Nazi-slayer, saw himself in competition with the persecuted Jews. Not for decades would the world community come to terms with the catastrophic dimensions of the Holocaust, but Stalin already sensed that the plight of the Jews would gain increasing attention and could achieve significance well beyond anything he had envisioned. The persecution of the Jewish people had the potential to become the cause on the world stage. And Stalin, so shrewdly sensitive to the faintest trace of deviance, within and without the Soviet Union, felt that he had to stamp out any memory of a victimized Jewish people. More than any other group, they were a threat to the very identity of his idealized “Soviet citizens.”79
CHAPTER 11
Soviet Retribution and Ethnic Groups
During the civil war after the Russian Revolution, Stalin saw for himself that some of the ethnic groups in the Soviet south hated everything about Communism. When Hitler’s invading forces arrived in 1941, some of the same groups collaborated. Stalin determined that, as soon as the Germans were driven out, he would punish them. He did not learn this approach from Hitler. Rather, he built on Russian traditions and the pattern he had established in the 1930s of deporting entire “suspect” peoples. After the Second World War, the scale of such operations grew exponentially and soon spilled over to the “recovered territories” of the Baltic states and western Ukraine.
Historians of the Cold War usually overlook what happened in the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and the Crimea. This tendency in the literature is unfortunate, since it was precisely in those regions that Stalinization showed its true face at war’s end. The retributive operations were part of the larger process of reestablishing the Soviet dictatorship and securing its hold on the people, in anticipation of the coming struggle outside Soviet borders.
THE USSR’S GERMAN MINORITY
When war broke out in 1941, there were only a few German passport holders in the USSR and they were interned. However, there was a large German minority of 1.4 million who were Soviet citizens and had lived in Russia for decades, even centuries. Stalin was not the only leader to have some doubts about their loyalty, but on August 3 his anger was sparked when the military informed him that “residents of a German village” on the southern front greeted the invaders with bread and salt and that a few shot at the retreating Red Army. The Soviet military wanted steps taken because there were other German villages near the fighting. Since the reports came at the time of the invaders’ early victories, Stalin lashed out and told NKVD chief Beria “to get rid of the lot.”1
Beginning on August 27, a series of orders were issued to deal with the “tens of thousands of spies and saboteurs” among the Povolzhskie Nemtsy, the long-settled Germans on the Volga. The rationalization was simple: If subversive acts were to take place among these people, then the government would have to take steps that could well lead to “mass bloodshed.”2 Rather than take that risk, the Supreme Soviet (in fact, Stalin) decided it would be better to “resettle without exception” all Germans of the Volga region, estimated at 479,841 people, as well as all those living in the Saratov and Stalingrad areas.3
The NKVD sent in 14,000 troops, and tribunals drew up lists of those to be evicted from their homes. Detailed accounts were taken of their property, and people were given the impression they would be compensated at their destinations. German women married to non-Germans were granted a privileged status and exempted. After a final house search, each family was brought to the railway depot, where the male heads were separated. The operation went off without a hitch. The unfortunates endured a trip east that took weeks, and as usual the reception areas were completely overwhelmed. No one knows how many died in this process, though the distinctive culture and way of life of the Volga Germans, along with their Autonomous Socialist Republic, was obliterated.4
Soon anyone with even a tenuous link to German ethnicity, no matter where they lived, was sent to Siberia or Kazakhstan. There they were employed in new labor armies, in which death rates were even higher than those in the Gulag’s special settlements. The final tally of German ethnics deported reached 1,209,430, which was close to every last one.5
As for German prisoners of war, Stalin decided as early as September 1939 that their labor would be exploited. More than four million of them went through more than five hundred camps or worked on mass construction, and though some were released soon after the war ended, many were retained and forced to slave until they were no longer “usable.” Their mortality rate in captivity has been estimated by Russian scholars at 15 percent, which may be low, but still translates into 600,000 deaths.6
These POWs were not simply destined by Stalin to serve as slave labor. He also saw to their ideological reeducation in “antifascism.” His underlings proudly reported to him the millions of POWs who were indoctrinated, so that when they made it home, they would proselytize the Communist faith.7
As the Red Army pushed back the invaders across Eastern Europe, the NKVD also arrested Volksdeutsche, that is, persons who had put themselves on a list claiming to be “ethnic Germans” to win favorable treatment.8 The new regimes soon created in Eastern Europe after the Nazis were driven out needed no special urging from the Kremlin to go all out against these people.
SOVIET-STYLE ETHNIC CLEANSING
Although we are used to thinking about ethnic cleansing as an invention of the twentieth century, it was “discovered” earlier. In Russia, for example, in the wake of its defeat in the Crimean War in 1856, tsarist forces deported tens of thousands of Muslim Tatars, supposedly for siding with Turkey. At the same time, Russia tried to subjugate the mountainous Caucasus and the Muslims there. In 1856 Dmitri Alekseevich Miliutin was sent to the region as chief of staff and after two years proposed to Tsar Alexander II that they remove all the mountain tribes and settle Russians in their place. The tsar agreed, and “demographic warfare” ensued. One of the Russian generals said its aim was to produce “a finality of result as had never previously been seen.” When Miliutin became minister of war, he preferred “voluntary resettlement” and even proposed helping the Muslims leave for the Ottoman Empire.