Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body

in the Age of Socialism

Author(s): Amir Weiner
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), pp. 1114-1155
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia:
Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the
Age of Socialism

AMIR WEINER

Therefore as soon as a spark appears it must be snuffed out, and the yeast
separated from the vicinity of the dough, the rancid flesh cut off, and the mangy
animal driven away from the flock of sheep, lest the entire house burn, the
dough spoil, the body rot, and the flock perish. [The heretic] Arius was one
spark in Alexandria; but because he was not immediately suppressed, the entire
world was devastated with his flame.
St. Jerome, Commentariorun in Epistolam ad Galatas libri tres.1

of the Soviet polity, scholars have thoroughly

IN THE WAKEOFTHE DISINTEGRATION
reevaluated basic categories in Soviet history such as class, ethnicity, and nation-
ality, as well as the policies associated with them. Amazingly enough, however, with
rare exceptions, these categories and policies have been treated as the context for
evaluating Soviet practices rather than being contextualized themselves. This essay
seeks to advance the current discussion by situating these concepts within the
overarching Soviet enterprise: the unfolding revolutionary transformation of soci-
ety from an antagonistically divided entity into a conflict-free, harmonious body.
The view of society as a malleable construct went hand in hand with a continuous
purification campaign seeking to eliminate divisive and obstructing elements.
Exclusion and violence, in this light, were not random or merely preventive police
measures that delineated the boundaries of the legitimate and the permissible but,
rather, integral parts of the ongoing community-structuringenterprise.2 I trace the

For their helpful comments and suggestions, I thank the readers and editors of this article. Earlier
versions were presented at Chicago University in October 1997; Indiana University and Ohio State
University, both in February 1998; Harvard University and the University of Toronto, both in April
1998; the University of California, Berkeley, in March 1999; and Georgetown University in April 1999.
I am grateful to all participants for their comments. Special thanks to Steven Barnes, Omer Bartov,
Michael Geyer, Brad Gregory, Francine Hirsch, Peter Holquist, Stephen Kotkin, Benjamin Nathans,
Aron Rodrigue, and Yuri Slezkine.
1 in Epistolam ad Galatas libri tres, in Patrologia latina, vol. 26, J.-P.
St. Jerome, CommentariorIm
Migne, ed. (Turnhout, Belgium, n.d.), col. 430. I thank Brad Gregory for pointing out this reference to
me.
2 For insightful treatments of the inherent relationship between violence and attempts to
implement utopian enterprises, see Hannah Arendt, The Originsof Totalitarianism(New York, 1951);
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernityand the Holocaulst(Ithaca, N.Y., 1991); Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany
and the Jews: Vol. 1, The Yearsof Persecution,1933-1939 (New York, 1997), chap. 3; Peter Holquist,
"To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial
and Soviet Russia," in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and

1114
 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1115

rationale of the Soviet Marxist quest for purity by focusing on three crucial
components: the correlation between the progression of the revolutionary time line
and the measures taken to realize the socialist utopia, the impact of Nazism and
capitalism on the Soviet political and social calculus, and the sites of excision. The
marked emphasis on ideology does not deny nor diminish the impact of circum-
stances, especially those of the magnitude experienced during World War II, or the
role of institutions such as the political police, the NKVD, which had a vested
interest in a permanent purge. It does explain, however, why the Soviets reacted in
the unique way they did to the same circumstances experienced by other polities,
why their unique punitive institutions were created in the first place, and why the
regime pursued its purification campaigns well after the conditions that initiated
them had dissipated.3

MARXIST REGIMES STRUGGLED with assigning primacy to either the "objective"

category of class origin or to the "subjective"criteria of conduct and experience. In
polities founded on the Marxist premise of the primacy of acculturation, but
simultaneously engaged in the constant eradication of social strata presumed to be
illegitimate, the tension between nurture and nature was constant.4 It intensified as
the Soviet polity advanced along the road to socialism and communism and
radicalized its purification policies both qualitatively and quantitatively. Following
the establishment of socialism and especially in the wake of World War II, social
and ethnic categories and practices were totalized in a marked shift: enemy groups
previously considered to be differentiated, reformable, and redeemable were now

Nation-Making in the Soviet Union, 1917-1953 (forthcoming); Leszek Kolakowski, MainzClurrentsof

Matxism, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1978); Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Moulntain:Stalinism as a Civilization
(Berkeley, Calif., 1995), chap. 7; Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bulreaulcracy,
Democracy, Totalitarianism(Cambridge, 1986), chaps. 8-9; and Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy:A
History of Socialism in Ruissia,1917-1991 (New York, 1994); Daniel Orlovsky, "The Hidden Class:
White-Collar Workers in the Soviet 1920s,"in Lewis Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Making
WorkersSoviet:Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 220-52; and Andrzej Walicki, Maixism
and the Leap to the Kingdomof Freedo7n:The Rise and Fall of the CommunistUtopia (Stanford, Calif.,
1995).
3 The scope of this essay limits the discussion to the framing of party-state logic and the impact of
cataclysmicevents. This is not to deny the considerable role local populations played in delineating the
socio-ethnic body. For an excellent treatment of the Soviet investment of power in the community to
execute key policies (if not to frame them), see Jan T. Gross, Revolultionfrom Abroad: The Soviet
Conqulest of Poland's Western Ukraine and WesternBelorlissia (Princeton, N.J., 1989). Also Amir
Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revollution
(Princeton, forthcoming), chaps. 5-6.
4 On the prevalence of this dilemma in Stalinist Russia and the struggles of individualsto cope with
it, see Kotkin, Magnetic Moulntain, chaps. 5-6; Igal Halfin, "From Darkness to Light: Student
Communist Autobiography during NEP," JahrbuicherffirGeschichteOsteitropas45 (1997): 210-36; and
Jochen Hellbeck, "Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi," Jahrbiicherfuir
Geschichte Osteiuropas44 (1996): 344-73. On the tension between "class as political behavior" and
"natural redness" in Communist China, see Lynn T. White III, Policies of Chaos: The Organizationlal
Cautsesof Violence in China's Culltiural Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1989), 222-25, 267; Richard Curt
Kraus, Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism (New York, 1981), 89-141; and the contributions by Stuart
Schram, Susan Shirk, Jonathan Unger, and Lynn White III, in James L. Watson, ed., Class and Social
Stratificationin Post-RevoluttionChina (Cambridge, 1984). See also Arendt's suggestive chapter on
"race-thinkingbefore racism" in Originsof Totalitarianism,150-84.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999

1116 Amir Weiner

viewed as undifferentiated, unreformable, and irredeemable collectives. This

totalization of the Marxist sociological paradigm challenged the commitment to the
primacy of nurture over nature in the ongoing social engineering project, inviting
comparison with contemporary biological-racial paradigms, most notably, that of
Nazi Germany-a comparison the Soviets were well aware of yet wanted to avoid
at all costs. The absence of genocidal ideology and institutions allowed for different
modes and sites of total excision from the socio-ethnic body within the socialist
utopia. Still, Soviet contemporaries continued to confront the ever-present shadow
of the biological-racial ethos.
The Soviet purification drive operated on a universal-particularisticaxis, com-
bining the modern European ethos of social engineering with Bolshevik Marxist
eschatology.5 Their fusion created a stable menu of categories and practices and a
dynamic mode of applying them. The Soviet state emerged and operated within an
ethos aptly named by Zygmunt Bauman as the "gardening state," which appeared
ever more universal in the wake of the Great War. This cataclysmic event brought
to fruition the desires for a comprehensive plan for the transformation and
management of society, one that would create a better, purer, and more beautiful
community through the removal of unfit human weeds. It was, in a word, an
aesthetic enterprise. The unprecedented increase in the capacities and aspirations
of the state went hand in hand with the view of society as raw material to be molded
into an ideal image. The transformation-or removal-of the individual and the
community became the accepted goal of the state both in its welfare and its punitive
policies.6
The European impetus to sculpt society seemed to develop boundlessly and

5For overdue and successful attempts to contextualize Soviet population policies within the ethos
of Enlightenment, see Kotkin, MagneticMountain, on the welfare state; Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors:
Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994); and Francine Hirsch, 'Empire of
Nations: Colonial Technologies and the Making of the Soviet Union, 1917-1939" (PhD dissertation,
Princeton University, 1998), on the role of social-scientific disciplines; Peter Holquist, "InformationIs
the Alpha and Omega of Our Work: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context,"Journal of
Modern Histoty 69 (September 1997): 415-50, on the emerging "gardening" state; Katerina Clark,
Petersbuig: The Criucibleof Revolutioni(Cambridge, 1995), on the cross-ideological phenomenon of
Romantic anti-capitalism.In his intriguing analysis of political religion, Philippe Burrin concluded that
totalitarian regimes (the political religions of communism, fascism, and Nazism) were incompatible
with the course and demands of modernity, and were bound to disintegrate if only because their
attempt to impose unanimity and undifferentiation ran against the grain of centuries of European
cultivation of the individual as an agent of his own salvation. See Burrin, "Political Religion: The
Relevance of a Concept,"Historyand Memory9 (Fall 1997): 321-49, here at 342. However, one cannot
gloss over the fact that the social, political, and economic institutions employed by totalitarian regimes
for managing their populations were the epitome of modernity.
6 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif., 1998),
119-80; Bauman, Modernityand the Holocalust,65, 91-93. For a recent impressive treatment of the
"gardening state" in various societies and ideologies, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How
Certain Schenmesto lnprove the Hutman Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998). Scott,
however, approaches the "gardening state" as a starting point in the practice of social engineering
schemes, glossing over the ways in which multiple non-state agencies-including those conventionally
considered liberal and progressive-initiated and often launched transformativeschemes. This pattern
was particularlynoticeable in pre-Soviet Russia before the party-state consolidated its role as the sole
organ of transformation.For the role of ethnographersin the shaping of population policies in Imperial
Russia, see Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors,95-129; Holquist, "To Remove, to Extract, to Exterminate";and
David Alan Rich, The Tsar'sColonels:Professionalism,Str-ategy, anzdSulbversionin Late linperial Ruissia
(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), esp. 29-64, for the role of military reformers. For the continual impact of
ethnographers in the Soviet polity during the pre-war era, see Francine Hirsch, "The Soviet Union as

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999

 Nature, Nurture, and Menory in a Socialist Utopia 1117

across ideologies. From Russia, Maxim Gorky observed in late November 1917 that
"the working class is for [V. I.] Lenin what ore is for a metalworker . .. He [Lenin]
works like a chemist in a laboratory, with the difference that the chemist uses dead
matter .. . [whereas] Lenin works with living material."7 But Bolshevik Marxism
was not alone in its refusal to accept human nature and society as they were.
Rather, the tension between nature and nurture was encoded within the larger
pan-European view of modernity whereby political authorities increasingly sought
to define and manage virtually all critical public and private spheres. The expanding
welfare state and the cleansing state were opposite ends of the inclusionary-
exclusionary axis, which became the trademark of transformative modern politics.8
Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, the remapping of Europe
increasingly evolved around what was referred to as "voluntary resettlement,"
"population exchanges," or the "unmixingof peoples," a rather polished, ex-post-
facto legitimization of ethno-religious cleansing.9 By the late 1930s, the chronolog-
ical starting point of our discussion, the transformation of society had already been
established as a cross-ideological phenomenon, involving liberal, socialist, and
fascist polities alike.10 And so in 1942, Eduard Benes, the figurehead of liberal
democracy in Central Europe, could state as a matter of fact that "national

a Work-in-Progress: Ethnographers and the Category Nationality in the 1926, 1937, and 1939
Censuses," Slavic Review 56, no. 2 (1997): 251-78.
7 Novaia zhizn' 10 [23] November 1917, as cited in Maxim Gorky, UnltimelyThloughts: Essays on
Revolution,Cultutreand the Bolsheviks1917-1918, Herman Ermolaev, trans. (New Haven, Conn., 1995),
89.
8 Between 1935 and 1975, none other than the Swedish welfare state forced the sterilization of
nearly 63,000 people, mostly women, often because they were considered racially or socially inferior.
About 4,500'mental patients had been forced to undergo lobotomies under officially encouraged
eugenics programsthat started in the 1920s. Gunnar Broberg and Mattias Tyden, "Eugenics in Sweden:
Efficient Care," in Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds., Eugenics and the WelfareState: Sterilization
Policy in Denmark,Sweden,Notway, and Finland (East Lansing, Mich., 1996), 109-10; "A Survey of the
Nordic Countries," TheEconomist, January23, 1999; "Sweden Plans to Pay Sterilization Victims,"New
York Times, January 27, 1999.
9 The systematic uprooting of Muslims patterned after the conscious urge to reorder society and the
increasing desire for ethno-religious homogeneity in the course of Imperial Russian consolidation of
rule over Crimea and the Caucasus, along with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the rise
of Balkan nationalism is considered a turning point in modern population policies. Willis Brooks,
"Russia's Conquest and Pacification of the Caucasus: Relocation Becomes a Pogrom in the Post-
Crimean War Period,"NationalitiesPapers23 (1995): 675-86; Rogers Brubaker,NationalismReframed:
Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, 1996), 152-56; Holquist, "To
Count, to Extract, to Exterminate";Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830-1914 (Madison, Wis.,
1985), 65-75. For a stimulating discussion on the emergence and evolution of corporate expulsions
carried out by the secular state striving for purity of its realm, see Benjamin Kedar, "Expulsion as an
Issue of World History,"Journal of WorldHistory 7, no. 2 (1996): 165-80.
10For insightful analyses of this phenomenon, see Michael Geyer, "The Militarization of Europe,
1914-1945," in John Gillis, ed., The Militarizationof the Westeni World(New Brunswick, N.J., 1989),
65-102; and Brubaker,Nationalism Refrained, 148-78. Whereas the origins and frequent use of mass
population transfers were unmistakably European, they were soon adapted by postcolonial non-
European regimes as well. Despite the passage of time and the new research on individualcases, Joseph
Schechtman's work is still a valuable starting point. See European Population Transfers,1939-1945
(New York, 1946); Postwar Population Transfersin Europe, 1945-1955 (Philadelphia, 1962); and
PopuilationTransfersin Asia (New York, 1949). Also see Istvan Deak, "How to Construct a Productive,
Disciplined, Monoethnic Society: The Dilemma of East Central European Governments, 1914-1956";
Gordon Chang, "Social Darwinism versus Social Engineering: The Education of Japanese Americans
during World War II";Norman Naimark, "Ethnic Cleansing between Peace and War,"in Amir Weiner,
ed., Modernityand PopulationiManagementin the TwentiethCenturty(Stanford, forthcoming).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999

1118 Amir Weiner

minorities are always a real thorn in the side of individual nations," and that the
ideal state of linguistic and national homogeneity could be reached only by
extensive population transfers.1"A little less than two years later, in a meeting with
Joseph Stalin, Benes concluded that "the defeat of Germany presents us with the
singular historical possibility to radically clean out the German element in our
state," a policy that was faithfully executed at the end of the war.12This powerful
ethos would wane only in the mid-1950s, when European regimes and parties
appeared to accept some limits on their transformative powers.13
Whatever its ideological coloring, social engineering possessed a tremendous
capacity for violence. The mobilization of the legal and medical professions for the
goal of perfecting society shifted the political discourse to new realms. The pretense
of scientific criteria and measures to study and work on the population meant that
the state would employ the most advanced and radical tools in its quest for a purer,
better society. The urge to maximize the management of society gave birth to a
myriad of institutions for activities such as passport control, surveillance, and
physical and mental cataloguing, without which the radical transformation of
populations could not have taken place.14And it was perfectly logical that the most
radical forms of mass extermination were preceded by smaller scale destruction of
groups categorized as incompatible and irredeemable both medically and legally,
then supplemented by military-industrialmethods of operation.15

11 Benes vowed that the mistake of 1919, when "idealistic tendencies" were governing,would not be
repeated. This time, it would be necessary to carryout population transferson "a very much larger scale
than after the last war." Eduard Benes, "The Organization of Post-War Europe," Foreign Affairs
(January 1942): 235-39.
12 Benes to Stalin, December 16, 1943, quoted in Naimark, "Ethnic Cleansing."
13 The renunciation of mass terror in the Soviet Union, the abandonment of collectivization, and
acceptance of a modus vivendi with the church in East-Central Europe, along with the abandonment
of integral socialism by the German Social Democratic Party, were key markers of this shift. The
various origins of the scaling down of state ambitions-self-imposed limitations by Stalin's successors
fearing another endless cycle of terror in the Soviet Union and the rise of effective civil societies in
liberal democracies-pointed to a common reluctance to accept without challenge the costs of
transformativedrives. However, collectivization and the Cultural Revolution in China and the Khmer
Rouge regime in Cambodia, to cite two examples, were powerful reminders that elsewhere the idea of
violent transformation still resonated.
14 See, for example, the Nazis' use of the meticulous Dutch registering and mapping of the
population for the implementation of their anti-Jewish policies in Bob Moore, Victimsand Survivors:
TheNazi Persecutionof theJewsin the Netherlands1940-1945 (London, 1997), 194-99; and Scott, Seeing
Like a State, 78-79. For the Soviet use of passportization in executing deportations in the annexed
territories in 1939, see Gross, Revolutionfrom Abroad, 188-89; and for the defining and persecuting of
internal enemies throughout the pre-war era, Peter Holquist, "State Violence as Technique," in
Weiner, Modernityand Population Management.
15 For the Pan-European discourse of degeneration, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration:A
EuiropeanDisorder, c. 1848-1948 (Cambridge, 1989). Of the voluminous literature on the lethal
combination of legality and biological-medical science in the service of modern extermination
campaigns, see especially Omer Bartov, Mutrderin Our Midst: The Holocalust,IndustrialKilling, and
Representation(Oxford, 1996), esp. 67-70; Ingo Muller, Hitler'sJustice: The Colurtsof the ThiirdReich
(Cambridge, 1987); Michael Stolleis, The Law under the Swastika: Stuidieson Legal Histoty in Nazi
Germany (Chicago, 1998); Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" in Germany
1900-1945 (Cambridge, 1994); Henry Friedlander, The Originsof Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to
the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995); Detlev Peukert, "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from
the Spirit of Science," in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluatingthe ThirdReich (New
York, 1993), 234-52. See also Richard Weisberg, VichiyLaw and the Holocaust in France (New York,
1996), for the culpability of the legal ethos and profession in the persecution of the French Jewry;and
David Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction,and Italian Modernity(Princeton, N.J., 1994), on the

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999

 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1119

Where the paradigm of modernity falls short is by not providing a satisfactory

explanation for the evolution of purification drives in totalitarian systems. If the
urge to perfect societies stemmed from the universal axis of modernity, its
implementation acted on clearly particularistic urges. First, the "gardening state"
blossomed throughout Europe no less than in the Soviet Union. In the wake of the
Great War, the European political landscape was marked by planned economies,
elaborate surveillance systems, and thoroughly politicized eugenics research. Yet it
was the Soviet polity that ended up with teleology as its economic modus operandi
alongside a system of concentration camps, mass deportations, and killings.16
Indeed, the Soviets went out of their way to underline this difference. Unlike the
Philistines who constantly lament brutality and the loss of lives and preach
reconciliation, the ultimate goal of the social engineering project-a genuine
moral-political unity of society-could be reached only through an irreconcilable
and violent struggle, declared Soviet ideologues.17 Second, the campaign to
eradicate internal enemies within the totalitarian state intensified after all residues
of political opposition had been crushed and, in the Soviet case, following the
declaration that Socialism had been built.18Terror becomes total, Hannah Arendt
observed, when it becomes independent of all opposition.19
The key to the distinctive development of the Soviets' purification drive lay in the
volatile fusion of historical time and its ultimate goal. It was an eschatological
worldview in the sense of belief in an end to History; it was apocalyptic in its belief
in the imminence of the End and that, in the wake of reaching socialism, Soviet
people were living at the final stages of History; it was millenarian in its belief that
the final cataclysm would be followed by the kingdom of communism, namely a
conflict-free and harmonious society, the very feature that set it apart from other
totalitarian enterprises, which espoused a cyclical conception of time and envi-

employment of reproductive policies and technologies in the service of social engineering in interwar
Italy.
16 Tim McDaniel's interpretive essay, The Agoniyof the RuissianIdea (Princeton, N.J., 1996), esp.
86-117, is an excellent starting point for a discussion on the tenuous relations between modernization,
communist ideology, and the Russian heritage. Unlike McDaniel, however, I am inclined to view the
totalitarian-revolutionaryethos as one ingrained in pan-European modernity, though one that acted on
particularistic ideologies, largely because of its aspiration for a total transformation of society. The
Russian heritage was certainly crucial for the evolution of Soviet communism, yet similar patterns in
Nazi Germany and Marxist regimes in Asia and Africa point to a supranational, cross-cultural
ideological phenomenon. In this sense, and despite its underlying teleological reasoning, Jacob
Talmon's magisterial trilogy is on the mark in identifying the issue as a primarily ideological
phenomenon rooted in the Enlightenment era. See Talmon, The Origins of TotalitarianDemocracy
(London, 1952); Political Messianism-The RomanticPhase (London, 1960); TheMythof the Nation and
the Vision of the Revolultion(London, 1981). See also Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revoluttion:
Philosophic Souircesof Social Discontent from Rozusseauto Marx and Nietzsche (Princeton, 1986), for
emphasis on the attempts of various European thinkers to overcome the dehumanizingspirit of modern
society and their dissatisfaction with the limited scope and impact of a political revolution such as the
French Revolution.
17 Georgii Glezerman, Likvidatsiiaeksploatators'kikh klassov ipreodelenie klassovykhrazlichiiv SSSR
(Moscow, 1949), 229.
18 In his speech at the meeting of SS major-generals at Posen on October 4, 1943, when the
extermination process was reaching its maximum intensity, Heinrich Himmler stated that no danger
was expected at that point from communists in the Reich since "their leading elements, like most
criminals, are in our concentration camps." Nazi Conspiracyand Aggression, Office of United States
Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality (Washington, D.C., 1946), 4: 560.
19Arendt, Originsof Totalitarianism,464.

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1120 Amir Weiner

sioned an endless struggle for domination and survival.20The quest for purity was
neatly tied to the distinguishing aspect of the Bolshevik utopia: from the moment of
its establishment in power, the Soviet regime imposed a time line marking concrete
stations on the road to realization of the communist utopia. Thus in 1947, the draft
of the party program set the goal of "building of a communist society in the USSR
in the course of the next twenty to thirty years," and in 1948, a leading political
theoretician could declare confidently that,
if it was possibleto organizea socialistsocietyon the whole withintwentyyears from the
momentof the triumphof Soviet powerunderthe most difficultcircumstances,then it is
entirelypossibleto assumethatafterthe triumphantconclusionof the PatrioticWarandthe
restorationof the ruinedpeople's economy,two more decadeswill be enoughto roughly
erect the highest stage of communism. Therefore,the generationwhich in 1920 was fifteen to
twentyyears old will live in a communist society.21

A year later, communism was said to be around the corner, with each day bringing
forward more evidence of the triumphant march to communism, including the
markers of communist harmony-liquidation of the great schisms between mental
and physical labor and between town and village-as the first secretary of the
All-Union Leninist Communist League of Youth (Komsomol) assured the dele-
gates to the Eleventh Congress of the organization in March-April 1949. The
"overwhelming majority" of Soviet youth, noted another secretary, already pos-
sessed "all the elements of the character of the man of Communist society."22On
the eve of the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952, Stalin threw his personal
weight behind the matter when he sought in his last major work on Economic
Problems of Socialism in the USSR to rush the march toward the higher stage of
communism by creating a central barter system that would replace collective farm
property and commodity exchange in the countryside, which he viewed as the last
existing obstacles to a full-blown communist economy.23And with the addition of
the new socialist "shock brigades"-the People's Democracies in East Asia and
20 For an excellent introduction to these concepts and the tensions they created in the early medieval
era, see Richard Landes, "Lest the Millennium Be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern
of Western Chronography100-800 CE," in Werner Verbeke, et al., The Use and Abuse of Eschatology
in the Middle Ages (Leuven, 1988), 137-211. Both fascism and Nazism aimed at the creation of
militaristic societies living off war. In the case of the Nazis, final victory was not necessarily viewed as
the only possible outcome. Here, I concur with Burrin, who emphasizes Nazism's, and Hitler's in
particular, "sense of its own fragility."Burrin, "Political Religion," 339-40; Geyer, "Militarizationof
Europe, 1914-1945," 101; Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, The Fascist Spectacle: TheAesthetics of Power
in Mulssolini'sItaly (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), 40. Ironically in this light, the Soviet Union, which is a
marginaladdendum to the Nazi state in Zygmunt Bauman's account, appears as the ultimate expression
of the gardening state, as it was the only totalitarian enterprise with a certain vision of its final goal.
21 Indeed, this confident prediction was presented as a "scientific answer to the question on the
historical epochs of building communism [that] we find in the writings of Lenin and Stalin." Tsolak
Stepanian, "Usloviia i puti perekhoda ot sotsializma k kommunizmu," in F. Konstantinov, et al., 0
sovetskomobshchestve:Sbornikstatei (Moscow, 1948), 539, 540, 542, italics in the original. The political
importance assigned to this intriguing collection of essays was underlined by its large circulation:some
120,000 copies printed for the 1948 and 1949 edition. Stepanian's elaboration on his essay was
published in 1951 under the title 0 postepennomperekhode ot sotsializma k kommunizmuand printed
in 200,000 copies. Several other essays were developed into monographs and enjoyed similar mass
circulation. For the 1947 party program, see Elena Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy 1945-1964
(Moscow, 1993), 93.
22 Komsomols'kaiapravda, March 30 and April 2, 1949.
23 "Ekonomicheskie problemy sotsializma v SSSR," and "Otvet tovarishcham Saninoi A.V. i

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999

 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1121

Europe-which altered the pre-war isolation, "the mighty motherland" was said to
be in the flower of its strength, possessing "everything necessary for building of a
complete communist society."24
These time markers had a direct impact on the definition of the "weeds"
intruding on the harmonious garden and the measures taken to uproot them.
Groups and individuals perceived to be hostile were continuously referred to in
biological-hygienic terms, whether vermin (parazity, vrediteli), pollution (zasoren-
ost'), or filth (griaz'), and were subjected to ongoing purification.25 Yet the
implications of this biological-hygienic rhetoric were not static. With the declara-
tion of Socialism built, the victorious outcome of the Great Patriotic War, and
communism in sight, the eradication of "this debris of the old world, a weed that
somehow grew up between the stones of our radiant building,"26assumed even
more urgency. In his well-known speech at the February-March 1937 plenary
session of the Central Committee, Stalin explicitly identified the new type of
internal enemy in the age of socialism, the elusive one, a theme that he had already
begun to develop in 1933 at the completion of collectivization. Since official
ideology and its institutional implementation were infallible, errors and failures
could be attributed only to the ill-will of individuals. After several decades of
socialism in power and constant purges, the continued existence of such human
weeds must be a result of their devious and elusive nature. Like a cancer, they
mutated themselves in different forms and various locations. And since this vermin
could not repent, it had to be removed from the body in its entirety. The question
was only how. The former brand of internal enemies, argued Stalin, was openly
hostile to the Soviet cause by virtue of social origin and professional orientation and
could not be mistaken for anything other than that. The new saboteurs, on the other
hand, were "mostly party people, with a party card in the pocket, i.e., people who
formally are not alien. Whereas the old vermin turned against our people, the new
vermin, on the contrary, cringe before our people, extol our people, bow before
them in order to win their trust."27Such enemies, reasoned Stalin, would resort to
the most extreme measures in their struggle against the Soviet state. The latter must
guarantee the excision of this vermin from its midst.
Stalin's warning was repeatedly invoked in the postwar purge campaigns but with
an additional edge. The moral-political unity gained by the relentless and thorough
purge was posited against the proliferation of "fifth columns" in the rest of Europe,
which, in the Soviet view, was a major factor in its quick collapse before the Nazi

Venzheneru V.G," in I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, 3 vols., Robert H. McNeal, ed. (Stanford, Calif., 1967),
3 (16): 205-07, 294-304.
24 See the speeches by Georgii Malenkov and Stalin at the Nineteenth Party Congress, Pravda,
October 6 and 15, 1952.
25 On Soviet preoccupation with the purity of the collective body with a special focus on the 1920s,
see Eric Naiman, Sex in Puiblic:The Incarnationof Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, N.J., 1997).
26 Komnsomol'skaia pravda, February 12, 1953.
27 I. Stalin, "O nedostatkakh partiinoi raboty i merakh likvidatsii trotskistskikhi inykh dvurushni-
kov: Doklad na Plenume TsK VKP (b) 3 Marta 1937,"Bol'shevik 7 (1937): 7. See Hiroaki Kuromiya's
examination of the January 1933 speech in his Freedomand Terrorin the Donbas:A Ukrainian-Ruissian
Borderland,1870s-1990s (Cambridge, 1998), 184-85.

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1122 Amir Weiner

onslaught.28With the announcement in mid-January1953 of the uncovering of the

"Doctors' Plot," a group of physicians, the majority of whom were Jews, accused of
plotting to murder Soviet leaders, Komsomol'skaiapravda reminded Soviet youth
that even when defeated the enemy does not rest. "Having won the war we turned
to construction again because we love life and youth, because we want to make our
land a flourishing garden. But while we build we must remember that the enemy will
continue to send spies onto our home front, to recruit all kinds of scum in order to
undermine our strength, to poison our joyous, happy life ... the greater the
successes in building communism in the USSR, the more active and vile the
operations of the imperialists and their myrmidons," concluded the call for
vigilance. Like the biblical serpent, these enemies were the most elusive imaginable.
"The spies and saboteurs sent to us by the imperialist intelligence services or
recruited by them within the country from among incompletely routed anti-Soviet
scum do not operate openly. They operate 'on the sly,' they mask themselves in the
guise of Soviet persons to penetrate our institutions and organizations, to worm
their way into confidence and conduct their foul work,"was Izvestiia'seditorial from
the same day. An unwaivering vigilance was required in order to "ensure the
cleansing of people's minds from the survivals of capitalism, from the prejudices
and harmful traditions of the old society," concluded the editorial.29
The arrivalof socialism ordained new sites of excision. First, with the destruction
of antagonistic classes, internal enemies became enemies of the people and were to
be sought in new realms.30By then, it was the nationality question that harbored the
clearest and most present danger to the moral-political unity of all the people,
declared Stalin in the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, underlining the
increasing ethnicization of the Soviet social body and the shift in the search for the
enemy within. The fight against recurrences of nationalist views had become the
most critical task in the struggle against the last vestiges of capitalism in the
consciousness of people, echoed Dmitrii Chesnokov, a prominent party ideologue,
in 1952. The residue of "zoological" chauvinism, especially in regions that were
temporarily exposed to fascist propaganda during the German occupation, repre-
sented a stubborn intrusion on Soviet harmony and called for the most severe
measures if harmony was to be maintained, Chesnokov concluded.31
Second, Soviet relations to the parallel modern politics across the European
continent were not merely phenomenological. Rather, the Soviets were constantly
checking their methods in the European mirror. The anxiety of potential degener-
ation into a zoological ethos was strongly present in the minds of Soviet contem-
28 L. Smirnov, "Neustanno povyshat' politicheskuiu bditel'nost' sovetskikh liudei," Bloknot agitatora
3 (January 1953): 11, 15-17; and Glezerman, Likvidatsiia, 193-94, 219-20.
29 Konsomol'skaia pravda, January 15, 1953; Izvestiia, January 15, 1953.
30 The category of "enemies of the people" was codified in Article 131 of the 1936 constitution. A
year later, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversaryof the October Revolution at the time when the
Terror was reaching its climax, V. M. Molotov pointed to the "unprecedented inner moral and political
unity of the people" that was forged through wrenching the country free from the rotting capitalist
society and in the ordeal of heroic struggle against the exploiting classes and foreign intervention. This
unity also meant that by now the enemies of the Communist Party and the Soviet government had
become enemies of the people," concluded Molotov. Pravda, November 7, 1937.
31 Dmitrii Chesnokov, Sovetskoe sotsialisticheskoegosudarstvo (Moscow, 1952), 209. The necessity
for coercion in the age of harmony and socialist democracy was hammered out by Chesnokov
throughout the entire exhaustive text. See 246, 556.

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 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1123

poraries. Throughout the 1930s, Soviet leaders, notably Stalin himself, reacted
vehemently against any suggestion that their sociologically based model of the
human subject could be equated with any biologically based, genetically coded
enterprise, whether the racial Nazi polity or eugenics and euthanasia policies, which
enjoyed widespread acceptance during that decade. When the totalization of
categories and practices in the wake of the war drove home the inevitable
comparison with the Nazi racial-biological code, the Soviets went out of their way
to emphasize that their destruction of internal enemies was not genocidal and that,
unlike the death camps, their own penal system remained true to its corrective
mandate.32
The specific sites of purification derived from this anxiety. The acute Soviet
awareness of being equated with the Nazi racial-biological enterprise and the fact
that total excision did not necessarily imply physical elimination pointed to other
sites of purification in addition to deportations or executions. Memory was a key
political arena where the body social was delineated. Inclusion and exclusion within
the Soviet body were defined to a large degree through both the commemoration of
cataclysmic events and the simultaneous erasure of the counter-memories of groups
and events deemed incompatible with communist harmony. In the highly stylized
Soviet polity, hierarchies of commemoration reflected the political status of groups.
World War II played a central role in this process, especially as the experience of
the war turned into the core legitimizing myth of the Soviet polity, along with the
denunciation and removal of some key elements of the Stalinist regime and the
routinization of other fundamentals of the revolutionary ethos.33The exclusion of
certain groups from official representations of the wartime Soviet fighting family
and the denial of particularistic suffering destined groups to political invisibility,
depriving them of official recognition of their distinct, collective identities.
This essay examines the varieties of the Soviet purification drives as they evolved
in relation to two groups that came to epitomize the obstacles to harmony from the
late 1930s on: the Ukrainian nationalist movement (a political-ideological effort
identified with its place of origin, Western Ukraine, but often substituted for the
entire Ukrainian nation) and the Jewish minority.34The sites of the Soviet drive

32 "In contrast to the capitalist countries, where concentration camps are sites of torture and death,

the correctional labor camps of the Soviet state are a distinctive school for the re-education of a
worldview bequeathed to us by the capitalist society," claimed a 1944 internal pamphlet of the
Cultural-Educational Department of the GULAG. M. Loginov, "Vozvrashchennyek zhizni," Gosu-
darstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter, GARF), f. 9414, op. 4, d. 145, 1. 3. Notably, a
decade earlier, it was the Western penal system that was the favorite point of reference. Belornor:Ani
Accouintof the Constructionof the New Canal betweenthe WhiteSea an-dthe Baltic Sea, Maxim Gorky,
L. Auerbach, and S. G. Firin, eds. (New York, 1935), 328.
33 On the hegemonic status of the myth of the war within the Soviet pantheon of "Great Events" and
its role in the articulation of political identities, see Amir Weiner, "The Making of a Dominant Myth:
The Second World War and the Construction of Political Identities within the Soviet Polity," Ruissian
Review 55 (October 1996): 638-60.
34 It appears that Soviet leaders, most notably Nikita Khrushchev, believed that Stalin would have
liked to turn the postwar eradication campaign in Western Ukraine into an anti-Ukrainiancrusade per
se. Throughout 1956-1957, Khrushchevrepeatedly suggested that only the sheer number of 40 million
Ukrainians prevented Stalin from deporting all Ukrainians after the war. See Khrushchev's "Secret
Speech" on February 20, 1956, in KhrushchevRemenzbers(New York, 1971), 652; and his comments
during the special session of the Central Committee in June 1957. Vladimir Naumov and Terence
Emmons, eds., Rossiia XX vek: Dokurnzenty;Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, 1957 (Moscow, 1997), 452.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999

1124 Amir Weiner

explored here are the central-western regions of Ukraine, which served as a

laboratory for social-ethnic engineering for every political movement that gained
the upper hand there, beginning with the deportations of Germans, Poles, and Jews
by the czarist government in 1915, and followed by the upheavals of the civil war,
collectivization drive, and famine. From the early 1930s, the population in these
regions was subjected to consecutive deportations of ethnic minorities and mass
executions during the Terror, followed by Nazi population policies and Ukrainian
nationalist ethnocentric policies, and finally by the resumption of the Soviet
purification drive in the wake of World War II. The history of these regions offers
a unique insight into the evolution of Soviet population policies.

As THE NAZI WAR MACHINE began to roll back across the European continent,
nations appeared determined to exact revenge on those deemed collaborators with
the Nazi occupiers. Following humiliating defeats and years of occupation, the
purge of the national body became the order of the day. On the surface, the
European purification enterprise appeared universal and grappled with common
core dilemmas regarding its form, extent, limits, and categories.
In their search for solutions to these dilemmas, nations referred primarily to
familiar paradigms. Indeed, most European countries had had prior experience in
mass exclusionary and reintegrative social operations. In the wake of the Great
War, during which many of these nations had been occupied, European countries
acquired rich experience in the use of amnesty legislation and the resocialization of
political opponents and criminal offenders, albeit with different degrees of success
and popular approval. For instance, bitter debates over the reintegration of World
War I collaborators took place in Belgium, which delayed amnesty legislation until
1937, while in the Netherlands the resocialization policy of criminal offenders was
enacted methodically through an extensive network of prison and aftercare
associations, including churches and trade unions. It came as no surprise that the
relapse of some of the rehabilitated collaborators in Belgium into similar criminal
behavior during the Second World War worked to toughen attitudes toward
amnesty and rehabilitation, while in the Netherlands the resocialization programs
and facilities for criminals were easily converted to reintegrate their World War II
black sheep.35
Less expected was the early realization that the prosecution of collaborators was
not a challenge to the pre-war order but, rather, a manifestation of its continued
power. A full investigation of collaboration-and not merely of those who served in
the German punitive and propaganda institutions-threatened to open a Pandora's
box of de facto accommodation by many of the sitting bureaucratic, judicial, and
economic elites. In essence, the entire existing order. And since the latter showed
no signs of acquiescence, the debate soon devolved into partisan politics. Public life
35As late as 1955, some 60,000 Belgians were still stripped of all or part of several political and civil
rights. Mass reinstatement of rights was made possible only in 1961 after the intervention of the
European Court. In Holland, on the other hand, by January 1948, the foundation in charge of the
resocialization of political delinquents employed 320 staff members and 16,000 supervisors who
oversaw 42,000 former collaborators. See Lucien Huyse, "La reintegrazione dei collaborazionisti in
Belgio, in Francia e nei Paesi Bassi," Passato e presente 16, no. 44 (1998): 118-19, 123.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999

 Nature,Nurture,and Memoryin a Socialist Utopia 1125

'V~~~~~~~~~~~~~~V

c~~~~~ [-

-.wi

FIGURE1: "FrenchJustice."A Soviet mockeryof the lenient Frenchtreatmentof wartimecollaborators.The

prosecutor offers the accused collaboratorsa seat at the judges' podium. "Fratsuzskaiafemida," by L.
Soifertis,in Krokodil(January30, 1953).

under Nazi occupationwas left out of the investigation,as were numeroushigh

officials who fit well into the renewed conservativeorder.36While the postwar
Europeanstate was busily extendingits domain into practicallyevery sphere of
society, the temptation to recall strayed, yet seasoned, bureaucratswas easily
rationalized.The impactof the unfoldingColdWarcouldnot be ignored,either.In
Hungary, a tiny communist party vying for more members opted for mass
recruitmentof none other than the rank-and-fileof the ArrowCross, the fascist
organizationnow in disgracewhose class orientationwas deemed more important
than its political past.37On both sides of the European divide, the developing
conflictdictateda facadeof nationalunity.Unpleasantand painfulreminderswere
shelved,or rathererased from the officialmemoryof the war.
Wartimeexperience,however,defied a universaldefinitionof collaboration.In
the vengefulatmosphereof devastatedPoland,attendingconcertsat whichGerman
36Martin Conway, "The Liberation of Belgium, 1944-1945," in Gill Bennett, ed., TheEnd of the War
in Europe 1945 (London, 1996), 117-38; here, 125; Conway, "Justice in Post-War Belgium: Popular
Passions and Political Realities," Cahiers d'histoire du temps present 2 (1997): 7-34; Luc Huyse and
Steven Dhondt, La repressiondes collaborations1942-1952: Un passe toujourspresent (Brussels, 1993).
37 As a result, party ranks swelled from 30,000 in February 1945 to 500,000 in October of that year.
Margit Szollosi-Janze, "'Pfeilkreuzler, Landesverraterund andere Volksfeinde': Generalabrechnungin
Ungarn," in Klaus-Dietmar Henke and Hans Woller, eds., Politische Sauberung in Europa: Die
Abrechnungmit Faschismus und Kollaborationnach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg(Munich, 1991), 355.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCrOBER 1999

1126 Amir Weiner

music was performed was deemed a collaborative act by the secret courts. At the
same time, in so many countries from France to Norway to Hungary, the very same
people both collaborated and resisted in accordance with their perceptions and
expectations of German policies and the changing tide of the war.38Neither martyrs
nor evildoers were in the majority in Nazi-occupied Europe. And it was precisely
this gray mosaic that stood in the way of national reconstruction.
At its core, the purge of collaborators was not merely about retribution or
restoration. Deep down, it was about the shaping of postwar society. Purification
was a transitional medium between the imperfect past and the improved-if
possible, perfect-society of the present and future. If the European experience is
taken as a whole, it appears that a precondition for the success of purification was
an ideal representation of the people as a positive, undifferentiated entity. "The
People" as one mythic group had to be exonerated from charges of collaboration.
The charge of collaboration was assigned to isolated patches of weeds. In a
concrete, tactical calculus, the blame for the initial humiliating defeats and
atrocities would be shifted from segments of one's own society to an alien element.
A dignified future required a heroic past. And if the past was to be a guide to the
future, it had to be painted in crisp colors. No shades of gray would interfere with
the heroic tale of the struggle between good and evil.39And so, as quickly as the
vengeful spirits arose, so, too, did they abate. All over Europe, retribution against
alleged collaboration faded away at a truly amazing pace, and arguments in favor of
the reintegration of convicted collaborators surfaced shortly after the end of the
hostilities.
The Soviet experience, too, pointed to an earlier paradigm, but one that
accentuated the sharp distinctions between totalitarian and other political enter-
prises. The Soviet policy of purge was not merely reactive. Nor was it conditioned
by tactical requirements. Rather, purification and reintegration were complemen-
tary components of the colossal project of building a new socialist polity. Specific
developments in the domestic and international arena affected the choices of
targets, but the goals and methods of dealing with these targeted groups and
individuals were subjected to an ongoing endeavor of restructuring.If the study of
the horrifyingwartime losses and destruction helps to explain the harsh retaliation
of the Soviets, then the reading of the war into the progressing revolutionary
narrative elucidates the unique choices of methods.
The war was not merely an unpleasant accident, nor was it a customary clash
between two major powers. It was the realization of a historical nightmare, one that
Soviet power expected from the moment of its inception. Throughout the 1930s,
Soviet citizens were constantly warned against the evils of German fascism and its
38 Istvan Deak, "Collaboration/Accommodation/Resistance,"a paper presented in a conference on
"Remembering, Adapting, Overcoming: The Legacy of World War Two in Europe," Remarque
Institute, New York University, April 24-27, 1997; Deak, "Civil Wars and Retribution in Europe
1939-1948," Zeitgeschichte7-8/25/Jahrgang 1998.
39 Quite likely, the most imaginative exercise in the European postwar creation of the "Good
People" took place in France under the auspices of Charles de Gaulle. In his contempt for the defeated
1940 generation and the minuscule Resistance, the French leader resurrected the generation of 1914
as the embodiment of the new France. See Pieter Lagrou, "Heroes, Martyrs,Victims: A Comparative
Social History of the Memory of World War II in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, 1945-1965"
(PhD dissertation, Catholic University of Leuven, 1996).

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 Nature, Nurture, and Memoiy in a Socialist Utopia 1127

implications for the USSR. The dominant theme of the Terror in 1937-1938 was the
excision of fascist agents from the Soviet body politic. If the alleged crimes of the
sinners in the late 1930s were presumed to anticipate the forthcoming catastrophe
of the capitalist encirclement, then the alleged crimes in the 1940s were perceived
as the full-blown actualization of the worst fears of the preceding decade. In the
postwar official narrative, the war was perceived as the inevitable outcome of
historical forces. "It would be wrong," declared Stalin in his election speech on
February 9, 1946, "to think that the Second World War was a casual occurrence or
the result of the errors of any particular statesmen, though mistakes were made.
Actually, the war was the inevitable result of the development of world economic
and political forces on the basis of modern monopoly capitalism."40
In this light, collaborators were not the by-products of the war but eternal
enemies whom the war and occupation helped uncover. Their destruction was
therefore not merely an act of defense but the execution of the Will of History. The
passage of time did not work to moderate the punitive policies against those
accused of collaboration. Whereas French politicians were quick to interpret public
opinion surveys supporting a reconciliation bill as a mandate for enacting amnesty,
Valentin Ovechkin's pleas for compassion toward those who went through the hell
of occupation remained unheeded.41 "Solicitude for the welfare of traitors who
helped the Nazis lacerate France shows up the present-day collaborationists in their
true colors. Birds of a feather," was the bitter reaction of Soviet newspapers when
the French National Assembly launched the debate over the final legislation of mass
amnesty for convicted collaborators in December 1952.42 As Europe was moving
fast on the road to amnesty and rehabilitation, the Soviet Union in contrast
intensified its campaign of retribution.
Ultimately, Soviet purification drives were never restrained by circumstances.
The purge of the party-the vanguard of the Soviet polity-was not subject to
administrative-managerialrequirements, nor did the admission that many commu-
nists had not risen to the occasion form an obstacle to the purge.43 When the
population at large was purged, entire ethnic groups were stigmatized as collabo-
rationist and deported into the Soviet interior. Within the grand scheme of social
engineering, even the loss of face was not a weighty factor. And no external
pressure, such as the European Court exerted on Belgium in 1961, was allowed to
interfere with the pursuit of purity.
However, the Soviet purification drive was not entirely different from the
European purge. If the postwar experience of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and
40 J. V. Stalin, "Rech na predvybornomsobranii izbiratelei Stalinskogo lzbiratel'nogo okruga goroda
Moskvy," in Stalin, Sochineniia, 3 (16): 2.
41 Following the May 1949 call by President Vincent Auriol for national reconciliation, opinion polls
showed that 60 percent of the French population supported a reconciliation bill. Several consecutive
laws in 1951 and 1953 practically allowed for amnesty of the clear majority of convicts and release of
most detainees. Hence, in Belgium during 1950, there were only 6,115 collaborators in prison (23.5
percent of the total number convicted), 6,715 in France (27.6 percent), and about 3,000 in the
Netherlands (8.9 percent). By 1955, the numbers were 487 (1.9 percent) for Belgium, 424 (1.7 percent)
for France, and 365 (1.1 percent) for the Netherlands. Huyse, "La reintegrazione," 121; Valentin
Ovechkin, Z frontovymp;yvitom (Kiev, 1946).
42 "Amnesty for Traitors,"New Times (Moscow) 49 (December 3, 1952): 19-20; "Krestovyipokhod

frantsuzskoi reaktsii,"Izvestiia, December 7, 1952.

4 Weiner, "Making of a Dominant Myth," 645-49.

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1128 Amir Weiner

Yugoslavia is any indication, it appears that multi-ethnic formations in many ways

comprised a distinct effort at purification. Wherever collaboration was presumed to
have had an ethnic face, the process of the purge continued well beyond that of the
more homogenous polities and assumed a more vindictive character.44Indeed, here
lay the gravest challenge to the ideal representation of the "Good People," a
challenge that resonated most clearly in the Soviet Union. One could think, and
with considerable justification, that the uninhibited savagery of the German
occupation of the Soviet territories would perpetuate the myth of the "Good
People" and make the purge of the collaborationist weeds a common national
enterprise. Finding themselves at the bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy,the Slavic
populations soon discovered that the various distinctions the Nazis applied to each
of them mattered little in the New Order. But the harmonious representation of the
People collided with the unintended legacy of Soviet pre-war nationality policy. The
racially based Nazi ethos had fallen on fertile ground. The principled cultivation of
ethnic particularism by the Soviets, be it the creation of ethno-national territories
or the ethnicization of the enemy-within category, rendered critical segments of
society susceptible to ethnically based visions and practices. In such a milieu, the
occupation of the non-Russian Slavic republics for most of the war, and the slightest
preferential treatment by the Germans, triggered contemporaries' reflection on the
consequences of the ethnicized Soviet world.45 In many regions, the Soviet
nation-building project had to be reconciled with the ethnic legacy of collectiviza-
tion, famine, and deportations. Similarly, the postwar translation of ethnically
based hierarchies of heroism into hierarchies of loyalty was a powerful challenge to
the myth of the "Good People." This leads us to consider briefly the nature of the
Soviet purification drive as it evolved prior to the cataclysm of World War II,
against which background the magnitude of the postwar cleansing must be
measured.

IN A POLITY BUILT ON THE PREMISE of "national in form, socialist in content,

ethnicity was not expected to become the primary category in social engineering.
Early on, however, the brutal experience of the Don Cossacks during the Russian
civil war and the suspicion cast on the Polish and German minorities throughout the
1920s made it clear that this neat distinction between form and content was difficult
to maintain.46As the Soviet crusade approached the realm of socialism, the tenuous
44Thus, in ethnically divided Belgium, where ethnic Walloons constituted the core of the
collaborationist movement, 53,005 of the 57,052 (92.9 percent) people prosecuted for various
collaborationist offenses were found guilty. Martin Conway, Collaborationin Belgium:Leon Degrelle
and the Rexist Movement (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 277.
45An intriguing linkage between Soviet passport policy and German racial policies and the impact
on the Kiev wartime population is offered by Lev Dudin in his memoirs, Velikii mirazh, Hoover
Archives, Stanford, California, Nicolaevsky Collection, series 178, box 232, folders 10-11, p. 73.
461919 witnessed the first recorded occurrence of conflating the body national and social with
anti-Cossack campaign in the Don region. Notably, this was a brief episode, as the regime retreated
from the practice for fear of denigrating the Marxist enterprise into a "zoological" project. See Peter
Holquist, "Conduct Merciless, Mass Terror: Decossackization on the Don, 1919," Cahiers du monde
russe 38, nos. 1-2 (1997): 127-62. Tellingly, in a review of the political situation in Podillia province in
1925, the discussion of espionage referred only to the large Polish-Catholic minority, which, it was
argued, had yet to be sovietized and was drawing the attention of the Polish government. Partiinyi

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 Natuire,Nurture, and Memnotyin a Socialist Utopia 1129

balance between social and ethnic origins increasingly tilted in the direction of the
latter. True, class would continue to be the raison d'etre of the revolutionary
enterprise to the very end, a concept written into the structure of each and every
Soviet institution. It was not for nothing that Stalin, the very person who renounced
class heredity as a detrimental factor in determining political legitimacy, went out
of his way to scorn party members in the Seventeenth Party Congress who "dropped
into a state of foolish rapture in the expectation that soon there will be no classes
and therefore no class struggle."47But overshadowed by Stalin's often-quoted
remark was the addendum that the survivals of capitalism were "much more
tenacious in the sphere of the national problem . .. because they are able to disguise
themselves in national costume."48The threats to the aspired harmony assumed an
ethnic face.
The conflation of class and ethnic categorization resurfaced with a vengeance
once collectivization began. Soviet power forcefully drove home the ethnicization of
class-enemy categories, especially when applied to the ethnic mosaic of the border
regions. Already at the onset of the assault on the well-off peasants, or kulaks, in
January 1930, local party organizations were ordered by the Ukrainian Central
Committee to "devise special perspectives with regard to the national minorities
districts (Germans, Bulgarians, and others)."49 And since Poles-as well as
Germans and Jews-were perceived as kulaks by nature, they were marked for
collectivization regardless of socioeconomic status.50
The ascendance of ethnicity within the excision enterprise was further accentu-
ated when deportations commenced in March 1930. The Politburo's order specif-
ically targeted ethnic Poles irrespective of the stage of collectivization and
regardless of their material position.51Indeed, only half of those deportees from the
border be6ltof the Ukrainian Republic in 1930 were classified as kulaks.52With
socialism built, ethnic hostility replaced class antagonism as the primary category
intruding on harmony, a shift that was underscored when the purification drive

arkhivVinnyts'koi Partii (hereafter, PAVO), f. 29, op. 1, d. 172, 1.45. On the tenuous relations between
the Soviet authorities and the German minority throughout the 1920s, see Nimtsi v Uk7aini20-30-ti r7r
XXst. (Kiev, 1994); I. M. Kulinychand N. V. Kryvets,Naiysy z istoriinimets'kykhkolonziv Uk7aini(Kiev,
1995); Harvey Dyck, Wei7narGermanyatndSoviet Ruissia,1926-1933 (New York, 1966); and Brubaker,
Nationalism Refrained, 112-47, for Weimar's policies within the broader framework of an external,
active homeland assuming responsibility for its diaspora co-ethnics.
47 I. V. Stalin, "Otchetnyi doklad XVII s"ezdu partii," in Sochineniia, 13 (Moscow, 1951), 351.
48 Stalin, "Otchetnyi doklad XVII s"ezdu partii," 361. A key marker in this shift was Stalin's letter
to P0oletarskaiarevoliultsiiain which the Soviet leader asserted that an alliance with "oppressed peoples
and colonies"-and not with oppressed classes among these peoples-had alwaysbeen the cornerstone
of Bolshevik ideology. Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors,259.
49 PAVO, f. 29, op. 1, d. 577, 1. 133.
50 The conflation of class and ethnicity with regard to the Polish minoritywas captured in the rhyme

raz Poliak-znachit klulak(all Poles are kulaks). Cited in Terry Martin, "The Origins of Soviet Ethnic
Cleansing," Joturnal of ModermHistoiy 70 (December 1998): 837. For complaints by the Vinnytsia
regional committee about the breakdown of the collectivization drive in the Jewish communities in the
region in late 1934 due to "counter-revolutionarynationalist and clerical" activity, see PAVO, f. 136,
op. 3, d. 225, 11.19-21.
51 Rossiiskii Tsentr Khraneniiai Izucheniia Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii (hereafter, RTsKhIDNI),
f. 17, op. 162, d. 8, 11.109-10. The quota for Ukraine was set at 10,000-15,000 households and the
Belorussian border regions at 3,000-3,500 families. For Soviet policy toward the Polish minority, see
Mykolaj Iwanow, Piewszy Na7od Ukrany:Polacy w ZwiazktliRadzieckim 1921-1939 (Warsaw, 1991).
52 Ihor Vynnychenko, Ukraina1920-1980-kh: Depo7tatsii,zaslannia, vyslannia (Kiev, 1994), 24.

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accelerated in the mid-1930s. Well before deportations resumed in early 1935, every
ethnic German living in the Soviet Union was "individuallyregistered to the fullest
extent" and his or her personal data transmitted to the Central Committee.53On
November 5, 1934, the Central Committee in Moscow ordered local authorities
throughout the Soviet Union to "remove the hostile anti-Soviet element from the
German villages and deport them out of the region and to apply the harshest
methods against the most active ones." The decree was implemented despite
awareness of a steep decline in the absolute number of ethnic Germans in the
border regions during the preceding period.54
The ethnicization of categories intensified the drive to homogenize the Soviet
body social. Those marked for deportation were classified as "undesirable ele-
ments," and the enterprise was officially characterized as a "cleansing of the mass
pollution of the [Polish] national village soviets."55Hand in hand, scores of national
soviets and schools were declared artificial and counterrevolutionary institutions.
On the path to communism, the reference to any structure as an artificial creation
by a foreign organization marked it as a weed to be uprooted from the Soviet
garden. It seemed no accident that district authorities were ordered to explain to
parents that children should be instructed in their "mother tongue," and conse-
quently several hundred schools were converted to Ukrainian language schools.56
The same rationale was offered in late 1937 when the Organizational Bureau of the
Central Committee (Orgburo) decreed the liquidation of a large number of
national districts and village soviets (German, Polish, Estonian, Finnish, Koreans,
Bulgarians, and others) throughout the entire union. The Orgburo declared them
to be artificial creations that did not correspond to their national composition and,
even worse, the creations of "enemies of the people led by bourgeois nationalists
and spies."57 Simultaneously, the Far East region was cleared of all ethnic
Koreans,58and large numbers of Germans, Poles, and Latvians were arrested or
executed regardless of their social class, occupation, or geographical location. In
some Ukrainian regions, arrests and executions eliminated almost all Germans and
Poles.59
Finally, the Terror delivered a brutal message regarding the limits of redemption
in the wake of triumphalistic socialism. In his canonization of the history of the
Communist Party, the Short Course, Stalin celebrated the physical annihilation of
53 Ingeborg Fleischhauer and Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Germans: Past and Present (London,
1986), 90.
54PAVO, f. 136, op. 3, d. 225,11. 23-31.
55Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads'kykhob"iednan' Ukrainy (hereafter, TsDAHOU), f. 1,
op. 16, d. 12,11. 39, 280; GARF, f. 5446, op. 16a, d. 265,1. 14.
56PAVO, f. 136, op. 3, d. 371,1. 5; PAVO, f. 136, op. 6, d. 591, 11.1-3, 11.
57 The Central Committee approved the resol-utionon December 17. Tsentr Khraneniia Sovremen-
nykh Dokumentov (hereafter, TsKhSD), f. 89, op. 62, d. 6,1. 14; d. 4, 1. 1; RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 114,
d. 829,11. 119, 121, 123-26.
58 Nikolai Bugai, L. Beria-I. Stalinzu:"Soglasno Vashemnu uikazaniii ... (Moscow, 1995), 18-25;
Michael Gelb, "An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far-Eastern Koreans," RuissianReview 54
(July 1995): 389-412.
59 For Ezhov's (the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs) orders requesting the arrest of
members of these communities on July 25 and August 11, 1937, see Buttovskiipoligon, 1937-1938
(Moscow, 1997), 348, 353-54. At the height of the Terror in the Stalino region in the Donbas, 80.2
percent of the 3,777 Poles and 84.6 percent of the 4,265 ethnic Germans arrested between September
1937 and February 1938 were executed. Kuromiya,Freedonzand Terrorin the Donbas, 231-33.

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 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1131

the elusive enemies who managed to survive previous cycles of purification. With
Socialism built, extermination was the only way to cope with those who had not yet
redeemed themselves.60 It seemed no accident that the first salvo of the ensuing
terror was directed at the punished and pardoned. Indeed, the latter figured
prominently in the Politburo resolution of July 2, 1937, "Concerning Anti-Soviet
Elements." Having been punished and stripped of their hostile class identity, these
individuals and groups appeared to have redeemed themselves through productive
labor, which won them not only the restoration of voting rights but also the release
of some from the special settlements. Indeed, only two years earlier, the rehabili-
tation of former kulaks was trumpeted as the triumph of nurture over nature.
Celebrating the completion of the White Sea Canal, the authors of the special
commemorative volume noted that "on the whole kulaks were the hardest to
educate . . . but even in these half-animals, the idolaters of private property, the
truth of collective labor at last undermineda zoological individualism."'61 Accord-
ingly, on January25, 1935, all former kulaks regained their voting rights.62But two
and a half years later, the Central Committee identified recently rehabilitated
former kulaks as the principal anti-Soviet element, responsible for a barrage of
diversionary acts in the countryside. In spite of regaining their civil rights and
permission to return from exile to their homes, they had allegedly resumed
hostilities against the socialist state. In essence, they proved to be immune to
socialist corrective measures and were consequently irredeemable. They were
marked for immediate arrest and execution.63In the era of socialism, redemption
was not offered twice.
Still, the pre-war cleansing policies maintained several key features that set them
apart from those of the postwar era. First, they aimed largely at cleansing specific
territorial space-mainly border regions populated by minorities with an external
active homeland-or politically suspicious segments of these communities, but not
entire peoples, which meant that targeted groups were treated as differentiated
entities.64 The lists of deportees from villages with "concentrated Polish and
German populations" were to include "independent peasants who did not fulfill
their obligations to the government and unreliable collective farmers [kolk-
hozniki],"just as the arrest and execution lists for these nationalities at the height
of the Terror consisted of mainly political emigres, alleged spies, and people
working in sensitive industries. Equally important, deportees often remained within
the boundaries of the Ukrainian Republic.65Hence, even after the conclusion of
60 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, edited by a
commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.) (New York, 1939), 346-48.
61 Belomor, 341, italics added.
62 GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 949, 1. 77.
63 For the July 2, 1937, resolution of the Politburo and the Central Committee, see Trud, June 4,
1992.
64 While Soviet anxiety over external homelands appealing to their brethren within the Soviet Union
or the fear of disloyalty in case of invasion should not be underestimated, they have to be squared with
a military doctrine that at the commencement of deportations of Poles and Germans from the
borderlands outlined a single option of an offensive into the enemy territory. See Raymond Garthoff,
Soviet MilitaryDoctrine (Glencoe, Ill., 1953), 67-68, 435-36; Mark von Hagen, "Soviet Soldiers and
Officers on the Eve of the German Invasion: Towards a Description of Social Psychology and Political
Attitudes," Soviet Union/Union Sovietique 18, nos. 1-3 (1991): 95.
65 In 1935, some 9,829 households were marked for deportation within the republic's boundaries,

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1132 Amir Weiner

repetitive waves of deportations, border regions were still populated by tens of

thousands of members of the deported groups, just as members of the marked
groups residing outside the targeted region were left unharmed, notably including
Koreans.66
Second, differentiation often left the door open for possible redemption. The
GULAG doors kept revolving, with 20 to 40 percent of the inmates released
annually.67Rehabilitation of deported kulaks continued throughout the second half
of the 1930s. The Council of People's Commissars Resolution on October 22, 1938,
provided children of former kulaks with internal passports and the right to move to
their place of choice (with the exception of closed districts), a right that elevated
them not only above their previous status but also above the rest of the Soviet
peasantry, which was deprived of passports and hence the right of free movement.68
Surveillance reports on deportees divided them into subgroups corresponding to
their potential for redemption. Hence the 15,000 ethnic Germans deported in the
spring of 1936 were split into a first group composed mostly of demobilized Red
Army servicemen, who responded to the resettlement with optimism; a second
group that felt cheated but could be redeemed with the right dose of propaganda;
and a third, whose expectations of a German invasion and unification with their
German brethren marked them as hopeless.69 Consequently, ethnic Germans
throughout the Soviet Union were still regarded as reliable enough to be drafted
into the Red Army, a policy that was bound to change only after this minority (and
others) was targeted in its entirety with the outbreak of the war. Even Koreans
residing outside the Far East were inducted into the Red Army, and their wartime
exploits would be recognized and rewarded by the Soviet state.70
Notably, the war itself soon became a redemptive vehicle for pre-war outcasts.
On April 11, 1942, the State Defense Committee (GKO) passed a resolution that
allowed the drafting of former kulaks into military service. The spouses and
children of the draftees were released from the special settlements and received

mainly to Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Odessa. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 16, d. 12, 11.38, 314;
GARF, f. 5446, op. 16a, d. 265, 1. 14. Beginning in 1936, however, deportees were directed to
Kazakhstan and Siberia. PAVO, f. 136, op. 3, d. 362, 1. 7; TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 16, d. 13, 1. 49. For
categories of arrests of various ethnicities in the summer of 1937, see Butovskiipoligon, 348, 353-54.
66 Gabor Rittersporn, "'Vrednye elementy,' 'opasnye men'shinstva' i bolshevitskie trevogi: Mass-
ovye operatsii 1937-38 gg. i etnicheskii vopros v SSSR," in Timo Vikhavainen and Irina Takala, eds.,
Vsem'e edinoi: Natsional'naiapolitika partii bolshevikovi ee osushchestvleniena Severo-ZapadeRossii v
1920-1950-e gody (Petrovsk, 1998), 115; Gelb, "Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation," 406. On the eve of
the deportations in early 1935, Polish national soviets in the Vinnytsia region consisted of 77,545
people. Yet some 55,610 Poles were still counted in the Vinnytsia region in the 1939 census, as well as
95,679 in the Kamianets'-Podil's'kyiregion and 30,509 in the Kiev region. The census also counted
13,720 ethnic Germans in these regions, many of whom were later drafted by the Germans into the
police and civilian administrationfollowing the invasion in June 1941. PAVO, f. 136, op. 6, d. 503, 11.
63-65; Vsesoiuznzaia perepis' naseleniia 1939 goda: Osnovnye itogi (Moscow, 1992), 68-69; GARF, f.
9479, op. 1, d. 83, 1. 3. On the German and Polish communities in Vinnytsia in mid-1943, see the
account by the Ukrainian nationalist activist Mykhailo Seleshko, Vininytsia:Spomynyperekladacha
komisii doslidiv zlochynivNKJVDv 1937-1938 (New York, 1991), 124, 132-33.
67 J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rittersporn, and Victor N. Zemskov, "Victims of the Soviet Penal System
in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,"AHR 98 (October 1993):
1041.
68 GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 925,11. 282-83.
69 GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 36, 1. 15.
70 Gelb, "Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation," 406-07; Bugai, L. Benia-I.Stalinu, 22.

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 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1133

passports. In 1943 alone, this cohort amounted to 102,520 people.71As the head of
the GULAG administration noted with unconcealed satisfaction, many of those
released served with distinction, including five who had received the nation's
highest award, Hero of the Soviet Union. Inmates, including "politicals" of the
Terror era, were encouraged to follow these examples and win their way back into
society. Nor should the release of some 43,000 Poles categorized as members of an
"enemy nation" merely two years before be ignored.72In 1944, the NKVD and the
USSR Procuracy agreed not to prosecute former kulaks who left the special
settlements for various wartime services and failed to return. Mass rehabilitation
intensified in the postwar years. In 1946, the regime removed all limitations
imposed on the families of former kulaks who had children in the Soviet Army,
were participants in the Great Patriotic War, or received governmental awards, and
on women who married local residents.
With World War II, the ethnicization of categories of the enemy within came full
circle. An apparent consequence of the wartime redemption was the substitution of
ethnicity for class as the dominant inmate category in the Soviet penal system. On
the eve of the war, 90.9 percent of the 977,000 people recorded living in the special
settlements were classified as kulaks or family members of kulaks.73But on the eve
of the final wave of releases in early 1954, members of the 1929-1933 generation
numbered only 17,348 people.74 By then, the vacuum created by the release of
975,000 camp inmates to the front between 1941 and 1944 was filled with inmates
from the nationalities deported during the war, the newly annexed Baltics, western
Ukraine, and Belorussia.

THE WAR SAW A STARK SHIFT in the purge policies from cleansing certain spaces to
cleansing peoples in toto. The pre-war focus on specific border regions was replaced
by the targeting of each and every member of a stigmatized group regardless of
geographical location or service rendered to the Soviet state. Whatever anxieties
and inhibitions that had brought to a halt excision campaigns like that against the
Cossacks in 1919 were now removed. Excision was intended to be total, irreversible,
and pursued relentlessly. The treatment of ethnic Germans served as a model for
this new stage. Hence the decree on the resettlement of the Volga Germans on
August 28, 1941, was followed by decrees that extended resettlement to all ethnic
Germans in the Soviet Union and that ordered the removal of all ethnic Germans
from the ranks of the fighting Red Army. Remarkably, the decrees followed an
earlier official recognition of the voluntary enrollment of the community for the
71 GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 140,1. 12.
72 The releases were ordained by decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet
Union from July 12 and November 24, 1941, and GKO special resolutions in 1942-1943. The decrees,
which affected about 577,000 inmates, ordered the release of those convicted for absenteeism, moral
and insignificant malfeasances, and economic crimes. Political categories were not covered by the
decrees. "Gulag v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: Doklad nachal'nika GULAGa NKVD SSSR
V.G. Nasedkina, Avgust 1944 g.," Istoricheskiiarkhiv 3 (1994): 64-65. For wartime mobilization and
rehabilitation campaigns inside the camps, including the use of letters by former inmates serving at the
front, see Loginov, "Vozvrashchennyek zhizni," 4b, 11-12b, 14b-15.
73 GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 612, 1. 42.
74 GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 925, 11.280-84.

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1134 Amir Weiner

Soviet cause and the heroic fight of some of its members against the Nazi invaders.75
Moreover, as one scholar aptly observed, the deportation resolution was framed as
a prophylactic measure rather than a punitive one, where the Germans were
accused of harboring scores of diversionist and hostile attitudes to Soviet power as
opposed to performing concrete anti-Soviet acts.76The same applied to all other
ethnic groups marked for excision in the wake of the war. Whereas during the
pre-war era the presence of relatives who had served in the Red Army or partisan
detachments was enough to protect kulak families from being deported,77by the
end of World War II, officers and soldiers of the deported nationalities were
severed from their units, often to be sent to the newly established special regime
camps or work battalions while the war was still being waged.78As indicated by the
assault on the communal structure of the above communities as well as the Jewish
community, the postwar calculus was indifferent to the security of the borders and
the existence of hostile external homelands of stigmatized nationalities. The enemy
within was ostracized and acted on as a totality. Those convicted of political crimes
were exiled indefinitely upon completion of their sentences.79With the building of
communism set as a political goal and with a time line in place, the belief in the
malleability of the human subject in general and of internal enemies in particular
eroded.
Wartime conditions, especially in the occupied territories, furthered ethno-
national divisions, for example, German differentiation of POWs (such as the
release of ethnic Ukrainians),80the passivity of the majority of the population, and
the fact that the partisan movement was disproportionally populated by ethnic
75Tellingly, in the course of a conversation with a correspondent, Genrikh Geiman, one of these
Soviet Germans, referred to his unit as an "internationalbrigade," consisting of Russians, Ukrainians,
Mordovians,and Germans. "Yes, I am a German. And I hate with all my heart he who calls himself the
leader of Germany. I will fight him to my last drop of blood," declared Geiman. The interview was
published the same day the authorities issued the deportation decree. Komsomol'skaiapravda, August
28, 1941. For the September 8, 1941, decree on the removal of ethnic German servicemen from the
ranks of the Red Army, see Meir Buchsweiler, ed., "A Collection of Soviet Documents Concerning
Germans in the USSR," Research Paper No. 73, the Marjorie Mayrock Centerfor Soviet and East
European Resear-ch(Jerusalem, 1991), 17. For the extension of the deportation of ethnic Germans to
the rest of the union, see 0. L. Milova, ed., Deportatsiinarodov SSSR (1930-e-1950-e gody) (Moscow,
1995), 2: 54-56, 79-89, 118-30.
76 J. Otto Pohl, The StalinzistPenal System (Jefferson, N.C., 1997), 74.
77 Deportation decrees of kulaks in 1930 strictly forbade the exile of such families and even of youth
who broke with their kulak families. For a decree of August 23, 1931, by the Politburo enforcing
previous decrees issued by the Central Committee on January 30 and February 24, 1930, see
Istoricheskiiarkhiv 4 (1994): 171.
78 By March 1949, some 63,660 former Red Army frontline servicemen from nationalities deported
during and after the war were counted in the special settlements. This figure included 33,615 ethnic
Germans, 8,995 Crimean Tatars, 6,184 Kalmyks, 4,248 Chechens, 2,543 Karachai, and 946 Ingush.
Nikolai Bugai, "40-50-e gody: Posledstviia deportatsii narodov (Svidetel'stvuiut arkhivyNKVD-MVD
SSSR)," Istoriia SSSR 1 (1992): 134; Tak eto bylo: Natsional'nye repressii v SSSR 1919-1952 gody
(Moscow, 1993), 1: 312; Aleksander Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation anidthe Fate of
SovietMinoritiesat the End of the Second WorldWar(New York, 1979), 83. On the special regime camps
established in December 1941 for Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans and people who lived
in the German occupation zone, see Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec, eds., Rapportssecretssovietiques:
La societe rulssedanisles docutmentscoifidentiels, 1921-1991 (Paris, 1994), 391.
79 See the decree of February21, 1948, of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, GARF,
f. 7523, op. 36, d. 345, 11.53-54.
80 Alexander Dallin, Ge)man Rlulein Ruissia1941-1945: A Stutdyof Occupation Policies (London,
1981), 412-14; Harvard University Refugee Interview Project (hereafter, HURIP), no. 548, p. 1. The
discriminatorypolicy in favor of the Ukrainian POWs was abandoned in early November 1941, under

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 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1135

Russians. Already during the war, the Soviet criminalization of passivity (directed
against the "hubbies"hiding behind women's skirts, as one partisan leader referred
to those who claimed to be terrorized by the prospects of Nazi retaliation81)
assumed a clear ethnic face. Finally, the ferocious clashes with nationalist separatist
movements significantly contributed to the hardening of Soviet attitudes toward
domestic enemies. But wartime circumstances alone cannot account for the
qualitative shift in the Soviet purification drive. Their meaning for and impact on
contemporaries could not be detached from the preceding Soviet experience and
treated as universal. The endurance and institutionalization of state revenge against
those identified as internal enemies set the Soviet Union apart from other
European countries and the United States, and points to another explanation.
Wartime circumstances were read into the progressing narrative of the revolution,
which was itself undergoing change at the time.

REFLECTING ON HIS WARTIME EXPERIENCE in Yugoslavia, Milovan Djilas, then a

communist partisan leader, rationalized the execution of the leaders of a certain
clan, whose members were friendly to the communist partisans, as the failure of
some of its members to subject their "primeval clan ties" and loyalties to that of
their political organization. The agitated members of the Tadic clan were executed
together with royal officers, "not merely for economy but to associate the fate of
party enemies with that of outside enemies." This ideological commitment, noted
Djilas, allowed for opponents, whoever they were, to be dealt with in summary
fashion.82 Djilas would later conceptualize the role of ideology in the practice of
violence. "No matter what your ideology may be," said Djilas, "once you believe
that you are in the possession of some infallible truth, you become a combatant in
a religious war. There is nothing to prevent you from robbing, burning and
slaughtering in the name of your truth, for you are doing it with a perfectly clear
conscience-indeed the truth in your possession makes it your duty to pursue it with
an iron logic and unwavering will ... [I]deology demands the liquidation of your
enemies, real or imagined."83 With the inspiration of revolutionary idealism,
neither mass brutality in general nor the killing of individuals in particular was
considered regrettable or detrimental. Indeed, while the Soviet practice of violence
could be and was triggered by specific circumstances such as military necessity, its
logic was anchored in ideology. Violence was applied within a well-defined
ideological framework, which earmarked certain groups based on preconceived
biases and was incorporated into an all-encompassing drive to purify the socio-
national body. Any potential restraint on the exterminatory campaign against the
Ukrainian nationalists was neutralized by an appeal to higher loyalties. Brutalities
were committed as the ultimate expression of loyalty to the socialist drive and its

pressure from both the German civilian administration and army commanders, who sought to use the
POWs as auxiliary laborers.
81 Aleksei Fedorov, Podpol'nyi obkom deistvuet (Moscow, 1986), 405-06.
82 Milovan Djilas, Wartime(New York, 1977), 164-65; and Djilas, "Christ and the Commissar,"in
George Urban, ed., Stalinismn: Its Impact on Russia and the World(London, 1982), 203-08.
83 Djilas, "Christ and the Commissar,"207.

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1136 Amir Weiner

administrative embodiments: the Communist Party and the Soviet Ukrainian

nation.84
In this light, the very existence of the Ukrainian nationalists was a violation of the
natural order, and hence no mitigating circumstances could be allowed in assessing
their crimes. Nor would utilitarian considerations play a role in the fight against
them. They would have to be excised from the Soviet Ukrainian body. Soviet
intelligence reports reveal that the Soviets were aware of the nationalists' clashes
with the Germans.85Knowledge, however, did not imply recognition. Notably, the
reports carefully emphasized that the shift in the nationalists' policy resulted not
from a change of heart or convictions but merely from disappointment at their
treatment by the Germans. For the Soviets, the very existence of the nationalists
was the bone of contention, not their tactics or alliances.
The total alienation of the nationalist cause was captured in a colorful passage by
Dmitrii Medvedev, a partisan leader-turned-writer. Referring to his own contacts
with the nationalist leader "Bul'ba" (Borovets) and his entourage, Medvedev
explained the national and linguistic alienation of the latter:
The speech of the "hetman"was incomprehensible, a barbarianmixtureof Ukrainianand
Germanwords.It was a language,as we later realized,broadlyused by those Ukrainian
nationalistsbroughtup in the pubs of Berlin and in the tavernsof Ottawaand Chicago,
personswithouta passport,withouta homeland,subjectsof the internationalblackmarket,
rascals,readyto sell themselvesto the Gestapoor the IntelligenceServiceor the Federal
Bureauof Investigationor any other bourgeoisespionageorganization.
National ostracization was augmented by a touch of class alienation. "Whereas the
[Bul'ba] wore a zaporozhtsa [a Ukrainian national shirt], the [others] preferred a
European suit, a colorful tie and manicured fingernails, which were considered a
sign of special refinement among the bandits," noted Medvedev.86
The nationalists were de-individualized, portrayed as an undifferentiated collec-
tive, detached from any specific domestic intimate environment, and often referred
to as animals. Killing them was not to involve any sense of guilt.87Thus members
of the Soviet polity should engage in systematic elimination of the "snake-like,
slavish dogs of the Nazi hangmen," the "Ukrainian-Germanfascists" or the "agents
of foreign intelligence services," rather than mere "Ukrainian nationalists." Nikita
84 See Alexander Alvarez, "Adjusting to Genocide: The Techniques of Neutralization and the
Holocaust," Social Science History 21 (Summer 1997): 139-78, esp. 152-53. For a pioneering study of
the key relations between the transformation of loyalties into the ideological realm and the
radicalization of the political scene, see Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints:A Study in the
Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, 1965). For suggestive observations on the analogous Nazi
understanding and practice of violence, see Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945: German
Troopsand the Barbarizationof Warfare(New York, 1986); Bartov, Hitler'sArmy: Soldiers,Nazis, and
Warin the ThirdReich (New York, 1991); and notably in areas not subjected to the anti-Bolshevik-
Slavic crusade, see Mark Mazower, "MilitaryViolence and National Socialist Values: The Wehrmacht
in Greece 1941-1944," Past and Present 134 (February 1992): 129-58; Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece:
The Experienceof Occupation, 1941-1944 (New York, 1993).
85 TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 685, 11.36-37. Significantly, the antagonistic relations between the
Germans and Ukrainian nationalists in the region had already been noted in an earlier report, dated
September 30, 1942. TsDAHQU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 124, 11.26-27.
86 Dmitrii Medvedev, Sil'nyeDukhom (Moscow, 1951), 84, 86.
87 See the suggestive insights of Ofer Zur, "The Love of Hating: The Psychology of Enmity,"History
of EuropeanIdeas 13, no. 4 (1991): 345-69, esp. 362-64; and James A. Aho, This ThingCalledDarkness:
A Sociology of the Enemy (Seattle, 1994).

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 Nature, Nurture, and Menory in a Socialist Utopia 1137

Khrushchev told a plenum of the Central Committee, "They [the Ukrainian

nationalists] killed themselves trying to please their master-Hitler, and to get only
a small portion of the loot for their doggish service. The German invaders shed the
blood of Soviet Ukraine, shot hundreds of thousands of Soviet people-women, the
elderly and children. The Ukrainian-German Nationalists assisted and at present
[continue to] assist the Germans in these bloody crimes, fulfilling the role of
hangmen.88To make things worse, while the German component of the evil duo was
beaten and driven out of the homeland, its Ukrainian counterpart continued the
destructive mission. The efforts to sabotage the restoration of the economy were
seen as the fulfillment of German instructions. Hence the internal enemy remained
foreign even when its foreign ally invader was expelled from Soviet territory. The
nationalists' efforts to disassociate themselves from their alliance with the Germans
were dismissed by Khrushchev as a play in the face of inevitable defeat.89
On the battlefield, therefore, the campaign against the nationalists was deliber-
ately launched as a war without prisoners. Between February 1944 and May 1946,
110,825 nationalists were killed within a territory inhabited by less than 9 million
ethnic Ukrainians.90NKVD reports on individual clashes with nationalist detach-
ments repeatedly failed to mention prisoners taken alive, emphasizing almost total
annihilation.91Deportations reached their climax between 1939 and 1953, when
some 570,826 people were deported from Ukraine without permission to return.92
A close look at the deportation figures, however, highlights the exterminatory
character of the anti-nationalism campaign in the field. Between February 1944 and
January 1946, the NKVD claimed to have detained 110,785 bandits (50,058 were
convicted), but only 8,370 people were arrested as members of the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists and 15,959 as active insurgents. The 182,543 nationalists
deported from the seven western regions between 1944 and 1952 included family
members of OUN or the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and their supporters,
non-adults, and families of those killed in clashes. Simply put, most of the actice
nationalist guerrillas were killed on the battlefield.93On the battlefield, "We did not

88 TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 1, d. 664,11.262-63. Khrushchev,it should be emphasized, was informed that

the Germans persecuted, if only occasionally, the Ukrainian nationalists, as well. A report by the
communist underground in Bar district, which was submitted to him on February 2, 1945, stated that
in early 1943 the Gestapo arrested and executed many of the nationalist activists. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op.
22, d. 166, 1. 12.
89 TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 1, d. 664, 11.265, 267. The association of the nationalist cause with foreign
powers persisted throughout the Soviet period, with the identity of the foreign patron changing
according to the contemporary geopolitical calculations. Thus when the authorities intensified the
campaign against the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church in Western Ukraine, it was the Vatican that was
blamed for financing and actively guiding the operations of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, The Ukrainican GreekCatholic Chutrchanidthe Soviet State, 1939-1950 (Toronto,
1996), 204-07, 238-39; Luka Kyzia and M. Kovalenko, Vikova bor-ot'baUkrcainls'koho naroda protl
Vatikanlit(Kiev, 1959), 200-07, 221-29.
90GARF, f. 9478, op. 1, d. 349, 11.1, 5, 9; TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 2867, 1. 26. Ivan Bilas,
Represyvno-karal'nasystemnaiv Ukraini,1917-1953 (Kiev, 1994), 1: 181.
91 Following one such clash on May 6, 1944, in the Khmil'nykdistrict, the NKVD was reported to
have killed sixty-seven guerrillas. Twenty wounded managed to escape to the forests, and only one
person was taken prisoner. Arkhiv Upravliniia Sluzhby bezpeky Ukrainy po Vinnyts'koi oblasti
(hereafter, AUSBUVO), d. 26674,11. 37, 46, 51; Tsentral'nyi Arkhiv VnutrennykhVoisk Ministerstva
Vnutrennykh Del Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter, TsAVVMVDRF), f. 488, op. 1, d. 51, 1. 10.
92 Bugai, L. Beria-I. Stalinti, 6, 212.
93Quite tellingly, people categorized as kulaks and their family members counted for merely 12,135

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1138 Amir Weiner

take prisoners as a rule. If we did take prisoners, we shot them after a preliminary
interrogation," a commissar of a partisan detachment casually told members of the
Commission for the Compilation of the Chronicles of the Great Patriotic War.94
Accordingly, the execution of captured nationalist guerrillas became a didactic
public spectacle, with party officials presiding over summary trials and hangings in
the village square.95Quite likely, the ritual of hanging, which had already been
practiced against convicted collaborators, was intended to add an element of
humiliation and terror, since the Soviet Criminal Code spoke only of shooting
(rasstrel) as the exceptional measure of punishment for extremely serious crimes.96
Once again, a comparison with other countries is telling. Estimates for the
Netherlands were three or four deaths on the occasion of arrests and forty deaths
in the internment camps caused by resistance members acting as guards. In the
significantly more violent Belgium, there were about forty extra-judicial execu-
tions.97In the USSR, public executions of alleged collaborators with the Germans
were something to brag about when party officials recounted their recent experi-
ence in the partisans' ranks. The Special Department of the Lenin Mounted
Brigade, which operated for a short time in the Vinnytsia region, was reported to
have executed, often in public, no fewer than 825 collaborators. If the figures
provided by the brigade's leaders are taken at face value, then the number of people
executed by a single partisan brigade, not necessarily the largest one and operating
within a rather small region in Ukraine, amounted to 13.7 percent of the total
number of summaryexecutions before and during the liberation of France, and 233
percent of those in Belgium.98Finally, violence was exercised primarilyfor political

of the 182,543 people deported between 1944 and 1948 at a time of an intense collectivization drive in
the western provinces. Bilas, Represyvno-karal'na systema, 1: 181; Vynnychenko, Ukraina1920-1980-kh,
82; GARF, f. 7523, op. 109, d. 195,1. 49.
94 Institut Istorii Rossii, Otdel rukopisnykhfondov, f. 2, op. 9, d. 3, 1. 5.
95 TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 1361,11. 9-10.
96 See Article 21 of the Soviet Criminal Code of 1926, which remained in force until 1960 (with the
exception of 1947 to 1950 when the death penalty was abolished). TheRussianPenal Code of the Russian
Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (London, 1934), 10. Boris Levytsky claimed that in April 1945 the
Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR decreed death by hanging as a deterrent to spies,
deserters, and saboteurs. Levytsky, however, did not support this claim with any document. Boris
Levytsky, The Uses of Terror:The Soviet SecretPolice 1917-1970 (New York, 1972), 167. Still, it seems
that hanging was practiced not only in summary trials on the battlefield but also in more formal
procedures against collaborators. Already in July 1943, eight Soviet citizens convicted of collaboration
were hanged in the city square of Krasnodarin front of 30,000 people, and newsreels of the trial and
the hangings were shown in local cinemas. Pravda, July 19, 1943; Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to
Nuremberg:Allied WarCrimesPolicy and the Questionof Punishment(Chapel Hill, N.C.; 1998), 64-65.
General Andrei Vlasov and his close associates were allegedly executed in this manner in Moscow after
being convicted of treason and collaboration with the Germans. Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the
Russian LiberationMovement (Cambridge, 1987), 79.
97 Evidence gathered from personal communication with Luc Huyse. At present, there are still no
official figures for the two countries.
98 Marcel Baudot's careful study of summary executions in France came up with a total of 6,029
people executed until the liberation in November 1944. Another 1,259 summary executions were
carried out afterwardwhen the jurisdiction of a legal purge went into full effect. Cited in Henry Rousso,
"L'6purationen France: Une histoire inachevee," Vingtiemesiecle: Revue d'histoire33 (March 1992):
82-83. For earlier and slightly higher estimates, see Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy: The
Purge of Collaboratorsin LiberatedFrance (New York, 1968), 60-78, 202-08. In Belgium, according to
a German account, some 353 executions of people in German service, police, and fascist organizations
were carried out between August 1942 and June 1944. After the war, partisans claimed to have

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999

 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1139

rather than military reasons. Soviet authorities made extensive use of the Destruc-
tion Battalions (istrebitel'nyebataliony)-auxiliary detachments of armed civilians
charged with hunting down German and nationalist stragglers-while professing
their negligible military value in the pre-1939 Soviet territories. The value of these
formations, noted the deputy head of the Ukrainian NKVD, was the radicalization
and proliferation of violence among the population at large, a key consideration in
the Soviet Manichean worldview.99
As summaryexecutions of presumed collaborators proliferated in the initial stage
of liberation, the returning Soviet powers moved quickly to curtail them. Immedi-
ately upon liberation, Red Army officers were said to prosecute, and in some cases
execute, partisans who exacted arbitraryrevenge after the liberation.100Random
retributions, which often bordered on anarchy, were not merely a threat to state
authority; for the latter, revenge was not necessarily the main motivation. The
exercise of retribution only by Soviet authorities integrated it into the overall
purification drive, which by now engulfed every layer of the polity. The return of the
regime as the sole arbiter and executor of revenge meant that the purge would be
conducted along lines that could hardly be imagined in a random, popularly
initiated purge. Extra-judicialjustice operated as a cathartic moment, after which
exhaustion, the desire to forget the imperfect past, and the impulse to reinstate a
certain equilibrium would combine to extinguish the flames of arbitraryacts. This,
however, was not to happen. The transfer of the prosecution of alleged wartime
collaborators and bystanders to the jurisdiction of the NKVD Military Tribunals
signaled that purges would become a permanent component in the political and
social life of the liberated regions.
The irreversibility of any form of collaboration was further underlined by the
absolute denial of political or social rehabilitation, even given the dire need for
experienced personnel, a policy that set the Soviet Union further apart from other
European countries that had been occupied by the Germans. In France, the
willingness of large segments of the population to accept certain acts of collabo-
ration as legitimate, albeit undesirable, acts of survivalwas taken by the authorities
as a mandate for mass amnesty. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, the presence of
similar sentiments worked to solidify the regime's resolve to excise collaborators,
regardless of circumstances and the need for their services. And unlike France,
there was no political or social redemption for people known to have served under
the occupation authorities.101There, noted Soviet commentators, the replenish-
ment of the state and military apparatus with former Vichyites amounted to a

executed about 1,100 collaborators. Etienne Verhoeyen, Belgie bezet, 1940-1945 (Brussels, 1993),
416-22.
99TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 1, d. 664,11. 201-03.
100 HURIP, no. 121, p. 12; no. 64, p. 3; TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 4980, 1. 154.
101 On the impressive comeback of Vichy officials, including the highest governmental offices, and
the profound continuities in personnel and administrative patterns in postwar France, see Bertram
Gordon, "Afterward:Who Were the Guilty and Should They Be Tried?" in Richard Golsan, ed.,
Memoty, the Holocaust, and French Justice: The Bousquet and TouvierAffairs (Hanover, N.H., 1996),
179-98; Robert 0. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940-1944 (New York, 1972),
330-57; Philip M. Williams, Crisis and Compromise:Politics in the Fourth Republic (London, 1958).

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1140 AmnirWeiner

conscious blurring of the distinction between victims and victimizers.'02Nor could

the stain of collaboration be removed by postwar performance. Soviet authorities
continued to exact revenge on those suspected of collaboration down to the bottom
of the social ladder. Professional and bureaucratic skills counted for nothing even
in the face of severe shortages. Time and again, successful rural experts and
kolkhozniki were denied governmental awards based on their spotty wartime
records.'03Tellingly, crimes appeared as a biological trait when the definition of
irredeemable sins was extended to include blood relatives of collaborators. Scores
of individualswere denied awards merely for being related to people who served as
policemen or in the Vlasov army.104Sons, after all, could be responsible for their
fathers.
Along with the revival of capital punishment for political crimes, the irredeem-
ability of the Ukrainian nationalists was codified on April 6, 1950, by order of the
Council of Ministers of the USSR. This directive replaced shorter deportation
terms for those exiled from Ukraine between 1944 and 1949 with permanent exile
(navechno), most notably the 182,543 members and supporters of the OUN-UPA
and their families. By 1950, Ukrainian nationalists appeared beyond hope, and their
exclusion from the Ukrainian body national was meant to be permanent. Accord-
ingly, families of both arrested and slain nationalist activists were deported. The
death of the latter was not necessarily redemptive.105
Purification continued relentlessly. As European legislators were feverishly
passing amnesty laws for convicted wartime collaborators, in the Soviet Union the
search for and prosecution of alleged collaborators intensified. Between September
20 and October 10, 1947, alone, 326 people were arrested in the eastern regions of
Ukraine on charges of collaboration with the German occupation authorities,
making them the single largest group of the 668 people charged with "anti-Soviet
activity."?106The 1955 amnesty decree of wartime collaborators excluded those
convicted of murder and torture of Soviet citizens, a rather fatal exception.
Whereas by 1958 in France, all those convicted of participating in the massacre at
Oradour-sur-Glane, the single largest wartime massacre of a non-Jewish popula-
tion, were released from prison, the Soviet regime continued to prosecute and
execute similar cases well into the 1980s. As late as December 1984, military

10' New Times (Moscow) 49 (December 3, 1952): 19-20; Izvestiia, December 7, 1952. The contami-
nation of postwar France was rounded out by allegations of forced recruitment of tens of thousands of
German prisoners of war into the Foreign Legion, which was a conscious state act. Such an act was in
line with the similar alleged release from prisons of hundreds of "SS cutthroats" in the Federal
Republic of Germany and their recruitment into the new German army. Izvestiia, January 22 and 28,
1949; Pr-avda,December 27, 1952.
1()3 One such list from October 13, 1948, included active collaborators but also some who had refused
to enroll in Soviet partisan detachments. Derzhavnyi arkhiv Vinnyts'koi oblasti (hereafter, DAVO), f.
2700, op. 7c, d. 136, 1. 58.
104 DAVO, f. 2700, op. 7c, d. 136 1. 52.
105 0 vypolnenii prikaza MVD SSSR no. 00248 ot 15 aprelia 1950 goda "Ob ob"iavlenii vyselentsam
ounovtsam' ob ostavlenii ikh navechno v spetsial'nykhposeleniiakh." GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 547, 11.
6-8; d. 896, 1. II; f. 7523, op. 109, d. 195, 1.49. Capital punishment was removed from the Soviet penal
code in May 1947. Its restoration for nonpolitical offenses took place only after Stalin's death. Peter
Solomon, Soviet Criminal JAstice itinder Stalin (Cambridge, 1996), 412.
106 TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 4978, 11.25-54. Here, 1. 29.

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 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1141

tribunals sentenced to death individuals guilty of killing Soviet POWs, activists,

Jews, and communist partisans.107
Nor did the post-Stalin amnesty signal rehabilitation. Individuals associated with
nationalist forces in Ukraine were released from the camps in early 1954, but it was
only in mid-1991, with the looming demise of the Soviet system, that they were
granted complete rehabilitation, on the grounds that "their hands were not stained
with blood."'108The same logic was applied to the national arena, where the
decaying regime mobilized all its resources in a vain effort to block the rehabilita-
tion of OUN-UPA in western Ukraine. Damning information from the KGB
archives about UPA atrocities was circulated in press conferences and published in
the popular press. Graphic data on massacres of peaceful citizens, ethnic Poles, and
Soviet activists, and the close collaboration with the Nazis, were used to underline
the essence of the nationalist movement as alien to the national body.109In
response to pleas by the L'viv regional party committee secretary, the Central
Committee in Moscow addressed the issue in a specific decree. The Central
Committee went out of its way to prevent the "justification of the crimes of the
OUN bands under the guise of criticism of Stalinism."To counter the rehabilitation
efforts by a variety of opposition groups in western Ukraine, it ordered the release
of archival documentaries on the nationalist atrocities during and after the war,
arranged for young people to meet victims of the nationalists, and organized a
scholarly conference on the "anti-people" deeds of the OUN-UPA. With the
approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, the treacherous
nationalists were to be exposed. As long as the Myth of the War was the pillar of
the polity's legitimacy, the excision of the nationalist cause was non-negotiable.

IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE that the totalization of Soviet practices in the quest for
purity brought to the fore the inherent tension between the biological and the
sociological categorization of the enemy within, and consequently the inevitable
comparison to Nazi Germany, the other totalitarian enterprise. Nowhere else was
this issue exposed more clearly than in the Soviet policy toward its Jewish minority.
In the wake of the war and the trauma of the Holocaust, conducted extensively on

107 Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
(Berkeley, Calif., 1999), 169. See Izvestiia, December 24, 1984, for the trial and execution of three
individuals convicted of mass executions of Soviet partisans. A valuable, though incomplete, survey of
Soviet war crime trials is in Lukasz Hirszowicz, "The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror," in Lucjan
Dobroszycki and Jeffrey Gurock, eds., The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the
Destrutctionof the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territoriesof the USSR, 1941-1945 (New York, 1993),
39-46.
108 Such was the case of Olga Shubert, who was seventeen years old when she joined the UPA in
November 1943. Captured by the NKVD shortly afterward, Shubert insisted under interrogation that
she had joined after the commander of the unit promised her protection from deportation to forced
labor in Germany. Shubertwas sentenced to twenty years but was released in February1954. It was only
in April 1991 with the looming demise of the Soviet system that she succeeded in her quest for
rehabilitation. Nearly forty years after the event, Shubert was grante,dcomplete rehabilitation on the
grounds that "her hands were not stained with blood." The stain of nationalist activity, however, was
almost irremovable. AUSBUVO, d. 26674,1. 72.
109 TsKhSD, f. 89, op. 20, d. 25, 11.1-5; Vasilii Evtushenko, "Banderovshchina,"Soiulz 9 (February
1990): 14.

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1142 Amir Weiner

AMRCNHSORCLRVE_OTBR19

FIGURE 2: "TwoBoots Make a Pair."A Soviet depictionof the Ukrainiannationalismmovementas an alien

body, blood brotherof the Nazi executioner."Dvachoboy-para," by 0. Koziurenko(Kiev, 1945). Courtesy
of the CentralScientificLibrary,Kiev.

Soviet soil with the implicit and often explicit approval of the local populace, as well
as a wave of popular and official anti-Semitism that swept the immediate postwar
era, ordinary Jewish citizens and activists began to ponder the unthinkable: was
there a logical affinity between the two ideologies? Already in the summer of 1944,
a group of disgruntled, demobilized Jewish servicemen protested in a letter to Stalin
that the Ukrainian Communist Party had "a lot in common with the course that
 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1143

originated earlier from the chancery of Goebbels, whose worthy transmitters turned
out in the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of
Ukraine.""I10This point was also laid out bluntly by Vasilii Grossman in his epic Life
and Fate, which he started writing at this time. Grossman chose none other than the
triumphant moment and site of Stalingrad to underline the common ethos of the
Nazi and Soviet enterprises:

Suddenly, probably because of the war, he began to doubt whether there really was such a
gulf between the legitimate Soviet question about social origin and the bloody, fateful
question of nationality as posed by the Germans .. . To me, a distinction based on social
origin seems legitimate and moral. One thing I am certain of: it's terrible to kill someone
simply because he's a Jew. They're people like any others-good, bad, gifted, stupid, stolid,
cheerful, kind, sensitive, greedy ... Hitler says none of that matters-all that matters is that
they're Jewish. And I protest with my whole being. But then we have the same principle:
what matters is whether or not you're the son of an aristocrat, the son of a merchant, the son
of a kulak; and whether you're good-natured, wicked, gifted, kind, stupid, happy, is neither
here nor there. And we're not talking about the merchants, priests and aristocrats
themselves-but about their children and grandchildren. Does noble blood run in one's
veins like Jewishness? Is one a priest or a merchant by heredity?"1'

Indeed, in the wake of the war, Soviet public representations increasingly identified
Jews as inherently resistant to Soviet acculturation and, even more threateningly, as
an undifferentiated entity. As early as December 1941, during a conversation with
a visiting Polish delegation, Stalin found time to reflect on the martial qualities of
the warring sides. The Slavs, observed the Soviet leader, are "the finest and bravest
of all airmen. They react very quickly, for they are a young race which hasn't yet
been worn out . . . The Germans are strong, but the Slavs will defeat them." Jews,
on the other hand, were repeatedly referred to as "poor and rotten soldiers."112
A core message of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign in the late 1940s was that the
Jew remained a Jew, an eternal alien to the body national, no matter what the
circumstances. As such, he had to be stripped of the false layers within which he
deceptively wrapped himself. In early 1949, the Soviet press violated one of the
taboos of Bolshevik revolutionary culture when it started disclosing pseudonyms.
The birth names of assimilated Jewish figures in the arts were regularly attached to
their assumed ones. And so the literary critic Ilia Isaakovich Stebun learned, along
with the readers of the republic's main newspaper, that at the end of the day, after
honorable service at the front and a career of writing in the Ukrainian language, he
was still Katsenelson. Similarly, the poet Lazar Samilovich Sanov found out that his
own work in the Ukrainian language and service as a war correspondent did not
110 TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 2366, 1. 25.
Vasilii Grossman, Zhiznz'i stud'ba (Moscow, 1988), 542-43. In his letter to Khrushchev on
February23, 1962, requesting the publication of his novel, Grossman noted that he had started writing
it already during Stalin's life. Istochnik 3 (1997): 133.
112 Stanislaw Kot, Conversations with the Kremlin7and Dispatches from Russia (Oxford, 1963), 153.
Stalin's comments were actually triggered by the derogatory remarksof General Anders, who referred
to the Jews as draft dodgers, deserters, and speculators "who will never make good soldiers." Kot, 153.
In his memoirs, Anders confirmed Kot's account of Stalin's anti-Semitic comments, although he went
out of his way to dispel the allegations of his own anti-Semitism by elaborating on the long history of
anti-Semitismof the Bolsheviks in general and of Stalin in particular.WladyslawAnders, Bez ostatniego
rozdzialu:Wspomneniiaz lat 1939-1946 (Newtown, Wales, 1950), 118, 124-25.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999

1144 Amir Weiner

change the fact that he was still Smulson, just as Zhadanov was still Livshits and
Gan remained Kagan.113
When the anti-Semitic campaign was reaching its climax in early 1953, the alleged
Jewish resistance to Soviet acculturation called for uncompromising methods by the
authorities. While exposing an accused Jewish embezzler in the small town of
Zhmerynkawho, needless to say, had managed to avoid the front during the Great
Patriotic War ("he fell ill precisely at the end of June 1941"), the satirical magazine
Krokodil posed a rhetorical question: "To tell you the truth, we became tired of
reading your decisions scattered there: 'to reprimand, to point out, to suggest,' etc.
Doesn't it seem to you, comrades,thatyou overestimatethe educationalsignificanceof
these resolutions of yours? And, anyway, who are you tryingto reeducate? Withsuch
touchingforbearance,too?"114The Jew, simply put, proved to be the anomaly in the
Marxist premise of the primacy of nurture over nature. He was immune to
reeducation. In early 1953, with the recent executions of the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee leadership, the unfolding Doctors' Plot, and rumors about the inevita-
ble mass deportation of Jews dominating the day, the recommendation to transfer
the case to the regional prosecutor (an office famed for meting out swift and harsh
punishments) sent the unequivocal message that there was only one way to deal
with such types.115As the living antithesis to the core Soviet myths of hard and
honest socialist labor and the martyrdom of the recent war, the Jew was beyond
redemption. His nature was immune even to the powerful acculturation of nearly
four decades of Soviet life.116
Uncovering the real Jew, however, was not confined to the Stalin era. Several
years later, it was the turn of the de-Stalinizing Khrushchev to warn other
communists against false hopes of acculturating the Jew. While attending a session
of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party, Khrushchev urged the
Poles to correct the "abnormal composition of the leading cadres" as the Soviets
successfully had done. Staring hard at the chairman of the meeting, Roman
Zambrowski, who was born Zukerman, Khrushchev exclaimed: "Yes, you have
many leaders with names ending in 'ski,' but an Abramovich remains an Abramo-

113 "Do kantsa razgromit kosmopolitov-antipatriotov!"Pravda Ukrainy, March 6, 1949; "Bezridni

kosmopolity-nailiutishi vorohy radians'koi kul'tury,"Naddnistrians'kazirka, March 27, 1949.
114 Vasilii Ardamatskii, "Pinia iz Zhmerinki,"Krokodil 8 (March 20, 1953): 13.
115 In his memoirs, Aleksandr Nekrich claimed that he knew "for certain" of a brochure written by
Dmitrii Chesnokov explaining the need for deporting the Jews. The brochurewas ready for distribution
when Stalin died. Nekrich, Otreshisot strakha:Vospominaniiaistorika (London, 1979), 114. Nekrich's
allegation was recently corroborated by Iakov Etinger, a former professor at the Institute of World
Economics and International Relations at the Russian Academy of Sciences. According to Etinger, the
book by Chesnokov argued that the Jews proved to be "unreceptive"to socialism. Iakov Etinger, "The
Doctors' Plot: Stalin's Solution to the Jewish Question," in Yaacov Ro'i, ed., Jews and Jewish Life in
Russia and the Soviet Union (Essex, 1995), 118. Throughout the Soviet Union, the secret police
recorded private conversations of both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in which the deportation of the
Jews was accepted as a fait accompli. See the documents assembled by Mordechai Altschuler, "More
about Public Reaction to the Doctors' Plot," Jews in Eastern Europe (Fall 1996): 34, 45, 52, 55, 56-57.
116 The impact of the events of February 1953 on popular perceptions was evident in the reactions
to the announcement of Stalin's ailment in early March. A Muscovite locksmith was recorded by the
Ministry of State Security declaring that "if Comrade Stalin does not get better, then we must go to
Israel and destroy the Jews." Cited in "Pervaiaprotalina-pokhorony Stalina,"Komsomol'skaiaPravda,
March 5, 1993. As a cosmopolitan entity, the Jew had to be excised not merely from the Soviet body
politic but from the universal body politic as well.

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 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1145

vich. And you have too many Abramoviches in your leading cadres."117Sometime
later, while reflecting on the evident failure of the Jewish Autonomous Region of
Birobidzhan to establish itself as a national homeland for Soviet Jewry, Khrushchev
concluded that it was the result of historical conditions. Yet his description of the
sociological was practically biological. "They [the Jews] do not like collective work,
group discipline. They have always preferred to be dispersed. They are individual-
ists," Khrushchev told Le figaro in an interview in March 1958. Finally, in the
crudest officially ordained anti-Semitic publication to emerge from the Soviet
system, Trohym Kychko'sIudaizm bezprikras,Nazi-like vocabulary and illustrations
drove home the message of alienation of everything distinctively Jewish from the
tradition of progressive humanity in general, the Soviet family in particular, and
even more specifically, from the Ukrainian nation. Portrayed as speculators and
hostile to manual labor, collaborators with the Nazis, and murderers of Symon
Petliura, Jews were entirely excluded from the October Revolution, the Great
Patriotic War, and Ukrainian aspirations for independence-all subjects of core
myths within the Soviet milieu.118
But this complete exclusion concealed a crucial difference between the Nazi and
Soviet enterprises. The class-based Soviet theory and practices of structuring
society seemed to present an ominous obstacle to the application of uniform social
targeting. Classes, strata, and layers were neither faceless nor homogeneous.
Rather, they were variegated and arranged in a hierarchical order based on the
services their members had rendered to the communist drive. Responsibility and
accountability were assessed on the individual's merit, even though this principle
was often compromised in the course of exercising the structuring acts. Maxim
Gorky was not off the mark when he stated in his celebratory volume of the
construction of the White Sea Canal that "the dictatorship of the proletariat has
once more earned the right to declare: 'I do not fight to kill as does the bourgeoisie:
I fight to resurrect toiling humanity to a new life. I kill only when it is not possible
to eradicate the ancient habit of feeding on human flesh and blood.' "119 Moreover,
individuals maintained the right to appeal and often did so successfully.120No one
could articulate this principle better than Stalin, and for good reason. In a series of
speeches delivered as the Terror approached its climax, Stalin explained its
guidelines. Concluding his remarks to the plenary session of the Central Committee
on March 5, 1937, Stalin warned the delegates not to confuse sworn and
irredeemable enemies with those who recanted and redeemed themselves when
they joined forces with the Bolsheviks in the anti-Trotskyite campaign or those
"who, at one point happened to be walking along the street where this or that
Trotskyite happened to be walking, too." "In this question, as in all other questions,
an individual, differentiatedapproach is required. We must not treat all alike,"

117 Joseph B. Schechtman, Star in Eclipse (New York, 1961), 81. According to Benjamin Pinkus, this
statement was authenticated by Jewish immigrants to Israel who held important posts in the Polish
party and government. Pinkus, The Soviet Governmenitand the Jews (Cambridge, 1984), 487, n. 38.
118 Trohym Kychko, Iudaiz7nbez prikras (Kiev, 1963), 160-61, 164-66.
"9Belo7no7, 338.
120 Thus the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Republic commuted five of the eight death sentences
passed by the Military Tribunal of the NKVD in Vinnytsia during the third quarter of 1945. PAVO, f.
136, op. 13, d. 48, 11.52-54.

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1146 Amir Weiner

concluded Stalin.121Three months later in a speech before the Military Council of

the Defense Ministry on June 2, 1937, in the wake of the liquidation of the military
leadership, Stalin reflected on the tension arising from the Soviet search for the
enemy within. Reminding his audience of Lenin's noble and Friedrich Engels's
bourgeois origins on the one hand, and of the proletarian origins of Leonid
Serebriakov and Iakov Livshits (former Central Committee Secretary and Deputy
People's Commissar of Communications, respectively) who turned out to be bad
apples on the other, Stalin concluded:

Not everyperson of a given class is capableof doing harm.Individualpeople amongthe

nobles and the bourgeoisieworkedfor the workingclass and not badly.Out of a stratum
such as the lawyerscamemanyrevolutionaries.Marxwas the son of a lawyer,not a son of
a batrak[agriculturallaborer]or of a worker.Among these strata can alwaysbe found
people who can serve the cause of the workingclass, no worse, [but] ratherbetter, than
pure-bloodedproletarians.That is whythe generalstandard,that this is not a batrak'sson,
is an outdated one, not applicable to individual people. This is not a Marxistapproach ...
This,I would say, is a biological approach,not a Marxist.WeconsiderMarxismnot a biological
science, but a sociological science. Hence this general standardis absolutelycorrectwith regard
to estates,groups, strata, [but] it is not applicable to everyindividual who is not of proletarian
or peasant origins.122

Indeed, the Soviets persistently rejected the primacy of the biological over the
sociological. The principle of human heredity and its potential practices, whether
exterminatoryeuthanasia or constructive eugenics, were officially repudiated in the
Soviet Union from the early 1930s on. What is more, the Soviet Union was
practically alone among the major countries in the 1930s in its rejection of
euthanasia or sterilization of the mentally retarded, a practice that was embraced,
often enthusiastically, on both sides of the Atlantic. In such an atmosphere, Nobel
Prize-winning doctor Alexis Carrel could call on modern societies to do away with
the mentally retarded and criminals who cost a fortune to maintain in asylums and
prisons. "Whydo we preserve these useless and harmful beings? Why should society
not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical manner?" asked
Carrel. The worst criminals (including the insane and people who misled the public
in important matters), he concluded, "should be humanely and economically
disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases ... Modern
society should not hesitate to organize itself with reference to the normal
individual. Philosophical systems and sentimental prejudices must give way before
121 "Zakliuchitel'noe slovo tovarishchaStalina na plenume TsK VKP (b) 5 marta 1937 g.," Bol'shevik

7 (1937): 19.
122 "Rech' I. V. Stalina v Narkomate oborony, 2 iiunia 1937 g.," Istochnik 3 (1994): 73-74, italics

added. For an intriguing analysis of the primacyof the individual in Soviet state violence, see Holquist,
"State Violence as Technique." In this light, and without underestimating Stalin's anti-Semitism, Lenin
could be recognized as a scion of the aristocracybut not as the grandson of the Jew Moishe Itskovich
Blank. When Lenin's eldest sister, Anna Elizarova, reminded Stalin in 1932-1933 of the Jewishness of
their grandfather, her reasoning for publicizing this fact ran against the grain of the Marxist ethos.
Lenin's Jewish origins "are further confirmation of the exceptional abilities of the Semitic tribe," she
wrote Stalin in 1932. In another letter, a year later, Anna wrote Stalin that "in the Lenin Institute, as
well as the Institute of the Brain ... they have long recognized the gifts of this nation and the extremely
beneficial effects of its blood on mixed marriages."Stalin's refusal to publish a word about the matter
became the rule for years to come. Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin (New York, 1994), 8-9.

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 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1147

such a necessity."123In Nazi Germany, as several scholars have recently reminded

us, euthanasia was a key element in ideology and practice, and the forerunner of the
persecution of the Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals, in sharp contrast to the Soviet
purification drive, which at no point was anchored in genocidal ideology.124Without
it, the operation of industrialized killing-the aspect that set the Holocaust apart
from other genocides-was inconceivable.125
The same logic applied to eugenics, the constructive twin of euthanasia. In his
1935 Out of the Night:A Biologist's View of the Future, Hermann Muller, the chief
advocate of eugenics in the Soviet Union, argued that with artificial insemination
technology, "in the course of a paltry century or two ... it would be possible for the
majority of the population to become of the innate quality of such men as Lenin,
Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat Sen,
Marx ... or even to possess their varied faculties combined ... which would offset
the American prospects of a maximum number of Billy Sundays, Valentinos, Jack
Dempseys, Babe Ruths, even Al Capones."'126 But when Muller forwarded a copy of
his book to Stalin in May 1936 and assured him that "it is quite possible, by means
of the technique of artificial insemination which has been developed in this country,
to use for such purposes the reproductive material of the most transcendently
superior individuals, of the one in 50,000, or one in 100,000, since this technique
makes possible a multiplication of more than 50,000 times," he practicallysealed his
fate and the fate of eugenics in the Soviet Union for the next three decades. Stalin
read the book, and although he did not respond in writing or verbally until June
1937, his actions spoke for themselves. Muller escaped the Soviet Union by the skin
of his teeth, but his cohort was shot to a man. The Institute of Medical Genetics was
disbanded, and the era of Lysenkoism and its doctrine of acquired characteristics
was ushered in. In the long process of constructing a socialist society, acculturation
prevailed over biology as the means of both the expansion and purification of the
polity.
And indeed, there was not, nor could there be, a highly placed Jew such as Lazar
Kaganovich in the Nazi leadership; nearly half a million Jews could neither serve in
the Wehrmacht nor become members of the National Socialist Party. It did not

123 Alexis Carell, Man, the Unknzown (London, 1935), 318-19. On the wide approval of sterilization
of the mentally ill in interwar Europe and the United States, see H. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi
Genocide, 7-9, 18.
124 Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance; H. Friedlander, Originsof Nazi Genocide. There was,
however, a single incident that accentuated the rule. In early 1938, about 170 invalid prisoners in the
Moscow oblast, who had already been tried and convicted for petty crimes such as theft and vagrancy,
were tried again for the same charges, only this time they were sentenced to death. The operation was
run by the special troika of the NKVD of the Moscow Region (the body that reviewed cases and passed
sentences during the Terror). The motive behind the execution appeared to be making room for the
arrival of deported Germans, Poles, Latvians and other ethnic groups. The chairman of the troika,
Mikhail Ilich Semenov, was himself tried and executed in the summer of 1939. Soprotivleniev Gulage:
Vospominaniia,Pis'ma, Dokumenty (Moscow, 1992), 114-27.
125 Ironically, Grossman, who insisted on the commonality of the Soviet and Nazi polities, was also
the first observer to recognize that the "conveyorbelt execution" was the distinguishing feature of the
Nazi exterminatorypractices. See his description of Treblinka in HaseferHashahor, 495-515, esp. 507.
For a recent penetrating analysis of the Holocaust as militarized-industrialkilling rooted in the ethos
of the Great War, see Bartov, Murderin Our Midst.
126 Mark B. Adams, "Eugenics in Russia, 1900-1940," in Adams, ed., The WellbornScience:Eugenics
in Germany,France, Brazil, and Russia (New York, 1990), 194-95.

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1148 Amir Weiner

matter if they had excelled in the ranks of the German army in the Great War.
There was one Jew, and he could not be Nazified. The Jew was an enemy not
because of a role he played or a position he represented. He was evil incarnate,
irredeemable, and unreconstructed, and as such, had to be exterminated. The basis
on which the extermination of the Jewish "lice" took place was neither that of
religion nor law but the racial biopolitics of genetic heredity.'27That was not the
case in the Soviet Union. True, enacting the motto "sons are not responsible for
their fathers" proved difficult. Just two years after Stalin's famous dictum, NKVD
and party investigators were busily plunging into the records of members of the
Communist Party, resurrecting from oblivion the original sin of the wrong social
origin to destroy scores of true believers and their families. In the wake of the
Terror, it appeared as if the stain of bad social origin was unremovable and
incurable. It took the war to realize and institutionalize Stalin's dictum in Soviet
political life. Nevertheless, even at the height of the officially endorsed anti-Semitic
campaign, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in the ranks of the party, the
army, and scores of other political institutions. Restrictions on the number of Jews
in state institutions (numerus clausus) could and did coexist side by side with Jewish
high officers, Heroes of the Soviet Union, and party activists.128The Nazi antithesis
was still a powerful deterrent, especially regarding the Jews. The United Nations
draft resolution of the Genocide Convention on November 21, 1947, provided the
Soviets with the opportunity to elaborate their own definition of excisionary and
exterminatory ideologies and practices. In his comments on the treaty, Aron
Trainin, then the leading Soviet authority in international law, agreed with the
prevailing notion of genocide as extermination of national or racial collectives. His
points of disagreement, however, were telling. First, argued Trainin, however
extreme the persecution of political opponents based on political motives may be,
it does not constitute genocide.129Second, the definition of genocide should not be
confined to physical extermination but applied to the curtailment of collective
national-cultural rights as well. "Of course, in the land of the Soviets, where the
Leninist-Stalinist national politics triumphs and the cooperation of nations is a
political reality, there is no problem of national rights and national minorities,"
wrote Trainin. It was, however, the case in the capitalist world, where class
127 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114, 146-47. In this sense, Saul Friedlander's recent introduction of

"redemptive anti-Semitism" as the guiding logic of Nazi attitudes toward the Jews requires some
modification. Redemption implies a linear concept of historical time and a certain finality, both alien
to the Nazis' nihilistic, violent, and cyclical view of history, one filled with nightmares of a possible
defeat at the hands of the Jews. Friedlander, Nazi Germanyand the Jews, 73-112. For a lucid analysis
of the place of the Jew within the Nazi racial hierarchy in theory and practice, see John Connelly,
"Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice," CentralEuropeanHistoiy 32, no. 1 (1999):
1-33.
128 A rare admission by a Soviet official of a de facto nitnerits clautsulsfor Jews was offered by
Ekaterina Furtseva, secretary of the Central Committee, during an interview with National Gulardian,
June 25, 1956. "The Government had found in some of its departments a heavy concentration of Jewish
people, upwards of 50% of the staff," said Furtseva. "Steps were taken to transfer them to other
enterprises, giving them equally good positions and without jeopardizing their rights."These steps were
misinterpreted as anti-Semitic,'Furtseva reassured the interviewer. Pinkus, Soviet Governmentand the
Jews, 58-59.
129 Eventually, the Soviets and their allies succeeded in omitting the category of political groups from
the draft, in a deviation from an earlier resolution of the General Assembly. Nehemiah Robinson, The
Genocide Convention:Its Originsand Interpretation(New York, 1949), 15.

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 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1149

exploitation could be identified with national oppression. Not only lynch trials but
also a dense net of national-cultural barriers separate Negroes in the United States
from the white population, Trainin continued.

Accordingly,internationallaw shouldstruggleagainstboth lynchtrials,as tools of physical

exterminationof Negroes,and the politicsof nationalculturaloppression.Therefore,along
with physicaland biologicalgenocide, the notion of national-culturalgenocide must be
advanced,a genocide that sets for itself the goal of underminingthe existence and
developmentof nationaland racialgroups.130

In essence, these were the twin pillars of Soviet population policies: the application
of state violence anchored in political rationale and the simultaneous cultivation of
ethno-national particularism. Without them, one could hardly understand the
simultaneous eradication of entire national elites and intelligentsias along with the
persistent delineation of particularistic identities.131In this light, total excision in
the Soviet polity was not necessarily exterminatory, nor did it operate by a
racial-biological code. And this, in turn, shifts the focus of our discussion to another
political arena within which the Soviet socio-ethnic body was delineated, that of
commemorative politics of cataclysmic events.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM POINTS TO the establishment of the state of Israel and the
unfolding Cold War as the primarycauses for the deterioration in the status of the
Jewish community within the Soviet polity. Indeed, the creation of the Israeli state
transformed Soviet Jewry overnight into a diaspora nation with a highly active
external homeland. In the 1930s, a similar situation cost Polish and German
minorities in the Soviet Union dearly. Often glossed over, however, is the centrality
of the living memory of the war and the Jewish genocide in shaping the course of
Soviet-Jewish relations and providing them with a constant point of reference in the
years following the war. Soviet officials were aware of this juncture. Years after the
war, when the leading Israeli poet Avraham Shlonski visited the Soviet Union, he
was told by Aleksei Surkov, the secretary of the Union of Writers, "There were
times when we thought that the process of Jewish assimilation was being intensified
by dint of the historical logic of Soviet conditions, and that the Jewish problem was
being solved by itself. Then came the war with its horrors, then the aftermath. All
of a sudden Jews began to seek one another out and to cling to one another."132If
Surkov is to be forgiven for some self-righteousness, he was not off the mark.
Ironically, none other than Vasilii Grossman pointed to memory as a key arena in
130 Aron Naumovich Trainin, "Bor'bas genotsidom kak mezhdunarodnymprestupleniem,"Sovetskoe

gosudarstvoi pravo 5 (May 1948): 4, 6. The official amendment offered by the Soviet delegation called
for the extension of the definition of genocide to "national-culturalgenocide," which included: "a) ban
on or limitation of the use of national language in public and private life; ban on instruction in the
national language in schools; b) the liquidation or ban on printing and distribution of books and other
publications in national languages; c) the liquidation of historical or religious monuments, museums,
libraries and other monuments and objects of national culture (or religious) cult." Trainin, 14.
131 For a stimulating discussion of this duality in Soviet nationality policy, see Yuri Slezkine, "The

USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,"Slavic

Review 53 (Summer 1994): 414-52.
132 Yehoshua A. Gilboa, The Black Yearsof Soviet Jew;y, 1939-1953 (Boston, 1971), 88.

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1150 Amir Weiner

shaping the postwar quest for purity. As the driving force behind the failed projects
of the Black Book and the Red Book, the works celebrating Jewish martyrdom and
heroism, respectively, which were never published in the Soviet Union, Grossman
offered keen insight into a new mechanism for engineering the Soviet body social.
The postwar construction of ethnic hierarchies of heroism and the simultaneous
leveling of suffering underlined the power of commemoration in the shaping of an
ideal-type community. This mechanism was fateful in particular for the Jews.
The Jewish contribution at the front was exceptional, even though no other
people experienced as much sorrow and misfortune as did the Jewish people, a
group of Jewish veterans wrote Stalin and Lavrentii Beria in the fall of 1945.
Nevertheless, protested the veterans, not a word had been printed in the Soviet
media about the community.133Indeed, Soviet authorities fiercely resisted all
attempts to carve a particularisticJewish space within the all-encompassing myth of
the war. "All of us hate the Germans! But I hate them doubly. Once because I am
a Soviet man. Once because I am a Jew! I was filled with hate because I saw what
the Germans had done to our people ... I yearned to get to Germany. I got to
Germany. I did my duty as a son of our motherland. I fought for all Soviet people.
I fought for all Jewish people," exclaimed David Dragunskii, the two-time Hero of
the Soviet Union in a speech before the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the
summer of 1945.134 "There is no need to mention the heroism of Jewish soldiers in
the Red Army; this is bragging," Il'ia Ehrenburg was told by a Soviet official when
he tried to push forward the delayed Red Book.135
In the same vein, the authorities viewed the annual gatherings of Jews commem-
orating the extermination of their brethren as a pretext for stirring up separatist
nationalist sentiments. When a survivor fixed the Star of David on an obelisk
erected atop a mass grave, the authorities threatened to bulldoze it unless it was
replaced by the five-cornered Soviet star.136And when Grossman echoed the Nazi
stand that "the fascists placed the Jew in opposition to all peoples inhabiting the
world," Georgii Aleksandrov shot back in a letter to Politburo member Andrei
Zhdanov that the
prefacewrittenby Grossmanalleges that the destructionof the Jewswas a particularistic,
provocativepolicy and that the Germansestablishedsome kind of hierarchyin their
destructionof the peoplesof the SovietUnion.In fact,the idea of some imaginaryhierarchy
is in itself incorrect.The documentsof the Extraordinary State Committeeconvincingly
demonstratethat the Hitlerites destroyed at one and the same time Russians, Jews,
Belorussians,Ukrainians,Latvians,Lithuaniansand other peoples of the Soviet Union.137
"There are no Jews in Ukraine," lamented a horrified Grossman when he first
encountered his liberated birthplace in 1943. "Nowhere-Poltava, Kharkov, Kre-
menchug, Borispol, Yagotin-in none of the cities, hundreds of towns, or thousands
of villages will you see the black, tear-filled eyes of little girls; you will not hear the
133 TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 2366, 1. 26.
134 Raymond Arthur Davies, OdysseythroughHell (New York, 1946), 206-07.
135 Il'ia Ehrenburg, Sobraniesochineniia, Vol. 9, Liudi, Gody, Zhizn' (Moscow, 1967), 377.
136 PAVO, f. 136, op. 13, d. 105,11. 16-17; Yad Vashem Archive, Jerusalem, no. 03-6401, pp. 15-16.
137 Vasilii Grossman and Il'ia Ehrenburg, eds., Hasefer Hashahor (Tel Aviv, 1991) (Hebrew
translation of the Russian text: Chernaiakniga/TheBlack Book), 17; RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 125, r. 1442,
d. 438, 1. 216.

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 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1151

sad voices of an old woman; you will not see the dark face of a hungry baby. All is
silence. Everything is still. A whole people have been brutally murdered."'138 True,
soon after this lament, the Ukrainian terrain was filled again with returning Jews,
albeit in significantly lower numbers and concentrated in fewer places. But already
in 1943, Grossman's words rang true with regard to the future as well as to the
recent past, and in a way he could not envision at the time. The invisibility of Jews
in the Soviet Union in general, and in Ukraine in particular, was not bound to be
a physical trait. The surviving Jews indeed returned but rather as a mythical
antithesis and into political invisibility.
At first glance, this seemed to be nothing unusual in a polity whose official
nationality policy envisioned at its final stage the merging (sliianie) of its various
ethnic and national components into a single entity. The Jews, in this light, were
leading the Soviet camp in terms of historical development. But there was an ironic
twist in this instance. Whereas the means by which ethnic groups would merge
passed through intense cultivation of ethnic particularism,the Jews, in the wake of
the war, were to skip this stage. And since the date of the final merging remained
as elusive as ever, the erasure of Jewish collective identity from the new legitimizing
myth of the polity bore grave consequences. In October 1946, the Jewish commu-
nity in the Soviet Ukrainian Republic joined the German and Polish minorities in
political invisibility when Jewish national rural soviets were converted into Ukrai-
nian soviets, side by side with growing official pressure for increased migration from
Ukraine to Birobidzhan.1-39
Deeply rooted popular anti-Semitism coincided with similar sentiments among
local and national leadership, but, more crucially, these attitudes were articulated
within the powerful Soviet ethos of a simultaneous search for harmony and purity.
And so thousands of decorated Jewish servicemen found themselves identified as
Soviet individuals but not as the "loyal sons of the Jewish people," as was the
practice of all other Soviet nationalities. Jews, the fifth largest group of recipients
of the title Hero of the Soviet Union, were erased as a distinct category from the
official list of heroic nationalities.140A barrage of popular novels portrayed Jewish
characters as draft dodgers who lived the war years in the safety of the rear-and
on the blood of their Soviet compatriots. In one of these novels, Vsevolod
Kochetov's Zhurbiny,the beating of such a Jew was portrayed as nothing less than
a cathartic moment of purification that transformed the inner being of one
worthless womanizer into a proud Soviet citizen. The party organizer who looked
into the matter concluded that of course such random violence was not commend-
138 Vasilii Grossman, "Ukraina bez evreev," in Shimon Markish, Vasilii Grossman:Na evreiskietemny
(Jerusalem, 1985), 2: 333-40. Here, 334-35. This is a translation back to Russian of the Yiddish version
that appeared in Eynikayt, November 25 and December 2, 1943. The original version in the Russian
language was apparently rejected by Krasnaiazvezda.
139 PAVO, f. 136, op. 13, d. 208,11. 6-7, 10. On the migration to Birobidzhan, see GARF, f. 8114, op.
1, d. 8, 1. 59; and Pinkus, Soviet Governmentand the Jews, 378.
140 This trend had already been traced with General Iakov Kreizer, the first officer decorated as Hero
of the Soviet Union on July 22, 1941. Krasnaiazvezda, July 23, 1941. Yet Kreizer's Jewishness was
mentioned only within the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, of which he was a member, and when
Khrushchev paraded him as one of his best friends, staving off charges of Soviet anti-Semitism.
Francois Fejto, Judentulm und Kommitnismnts: Anzti-Semitismus in Osteuropa (Vienna, 1967), 112. For
the disappearance of Jews as a distinct ethnic group among the recipients of military awards,see S. M.
Golikov, Vydaiushchiepobedy Sovetskoi armii v Velikoi Otechestvennoivoine (Moscow, 1952), 187.

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1152 Amir Weiner

able, but "as a man, [he] understands [that] such people deserve a slap in the
face."'141 In a polity that identified military service with local, national, and
supranational Soviet identities, and sacrifice on the battlefield as a sign of true
patriotism, exclusion from the myth of the war amounted to exclusion from the
Soviet family. A similar outcome, if only through a different practice, emerged from
the commemoration of wartime suffering. The mass murder of the Jews was never
denied in Soviet representations of the war, but in the official accounts and artistic
representations, memory of the Jewish catastrophe was submerged within the
universal Soviet tragedy, erasing the very distinction at the core of the Nazi pursuit
of racial purity.142
Such a policy certainly coincided with similar developments across the European
continent. In the restored societies emerging from the Nazi occupation, memories
of defeat and victimization were set aside in favor of intensive, state-sponsored cults
of heroism and resistance. In the ravaged and humiliated societies burdened with
the task of national revival, the mobilizing power of the myth of active heroism was
undeniably greater than that of victimization anchored in the shame and guilt-
ridden memory of defeat. Above all, memories of victimization bore the trouble-
some particularism associated with the Jewish minority. Jewish particularistic
suffering was integrated into an all-national paradigm of victimization and in some
cases transformed into one of triumphant heroism.143 The universality of the
activist-triumphantmyth was underscored by its predominance in the new Israeli
state, where Zionism helped to reconstruct a series of cataclysmic defeats in Jewish
history as redemptive triumphs, starting with the rebellions against the Romans in
the first two centuries AD and culminating with the Holocaust. In Israel, the official
commemoration of the Holocaust had been incorporated into the epic struggle for
an independent Jewish state. Jewish partisans took center stage in the Zionist
representation of the catastrophe and assumed the role of forerunners of the Israeli
army. Victims were often integrated into the family of fallen Israeli soldiers. The
official day of remembrance was named "The Day of Holocaust and Heroism"; the
national shrine was called "Yad Vashem Heroes' and Martyrs' Memorial." The
passive, fatalistic, and defenseless Diaspora Jew was converted into the fighting
Israeli.144
Such a dilemma and solution were all too familiar to the Soviet scene, and for
similarly compelling reasons. For one, the wave of pogroms that swept Ukrainian
cities in 1944-1945 marked a new development: for the first time in the Soviet era,
violent anti-Semitism exploded as an open, urban phenomenon. In such a volatile
environment and with the war still raging, identification with the traditionally

141Vsevolod Kochetov, Zhurbiny(Leningrad, 1952), 329, 335.

142 A good starting point is Zvi Gitelman, "Soviet Reactions to the Holocaust, 1945-1991," in Lucjan
Dobroszycki, et al., The Holocaust in the Soviet Union:Studiesand Sourceson the Destructionof the Jews
in the Nazi-Occupied Territoriesof the USSR, 1941-1945 (New York, 1993), 3-27.
143 See Pieter Lagrou, "Victims of Genocide and National Memory: Belgium, France and the
Netherlands 1945-1965," Past and Present 154 (February 1997): 191-222.
144 Omer Bartov, "Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust,"AHR 103
(June 1998): 771-816; Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York,
1993); James Young, The Textureof Memory:Holocaust Memorialsand Meaning (New Haven, Conn.,
1993), part 3; Yael Zerubavel, RecoveredRoots: CollectiveMemoryand the Making of Israeli National
Tradition(Chicago, 1995).

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 Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 1153

resented minority was the last thing desired by the returning Soviet authorities.145
Yet the wholesale deportations of alleged collaborationist minorities conveyed the
message that the Soviet polity would not shy away from opening the Pandora's box
of collaboration conceived in ethnic terms. This willingness directly to confront the
ethnic face of wartime collaboration (in sharp contrast to other multi-ethnic
polities), and the enduring denial of the particularisticJewish fate under the Nazis
long after the rest of Europe opted for such recognition, pointed to another motive,
one that lay at the core of the revolutionary myth.146
The twentieth anniversaryof the Great Patriotic War marked the transition from
a living to a historical memory of this cataclysmic event and a determined attempt
to develop a commemorative canon and a sense of closure. The last vestiges of the
socially alien element-the few remaining kulaks-were released and rehabilitated.
Ethnic Germans deported en masse during the war received an official apology
from the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union,147and, most notably, all limitations
on former leaders and members of nationalist underground movements, the last
category to win rehabilitation (and among whom Ukrainian nationalists were the
largest component), were removed.148 The reinstatement of the largest, best
organized, and most persistent of the anti-Soviet separatist movements into the
legitimate Ukrainian body national only fifteen years after it was singled out for
eternal exclusion was indeed the most visible marker of reconciliation. The
permission to return to their native places of residence was a display of confidence
in both the efficacy of the punitive system and in its redemptive power.
But no olive branch was extended to the Jewish community. On the contrary,
Jews were branded as traitors to the war effort. The community was handed a
mass-circulation historical novel, Tuchi nad gorodom, by Porfirii Gavrutto, which
developed an earlier charge by Khrushchev about an alleged treason and collabo-
ration of a certain Jew-Judas, "who betrayed the Kiev underground to the Germans,
served as a translator for Field Marshal Paulus, cleaned his boots, helped
interrogate Soviet prisoners of war and even shot at his own compatriots." The
readers were informed in the accompanying editorial note that the novel was
actually a documentary.149The Jew was not merely out of the Soviet family. He was
its living antithesis.
It was at this time that Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, noted that already
"with the expulsion of Trotsky and the extermination during the years of 'purges' of
old Party members, many of whom were Jews, anti-Semitism was reborn on new
145 For a comprehensive documentation of the postwar pogroms in Ukraine and the reactions of
Soviet authorities and Jewish citizens, see TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, dd. 1363, 2366. It was about this time
that Khrushchevwas alleged to have burst out, "here is the Ukraine and it is not in our interest that
the Ukrainians should associate the return of Soviet power with the return of the Jews." Leon
Leneman, La tragediedes Juifs eni U.R.S.S. (Paris, 1959), 179.
146For the shift in the West European discourse on the Holocaust in the mid-1960s, see Lagrou,
"Victims of Genocide and National Memory," 215-20.
147 For the decree of August 28, 1964, by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, see Tak eto bylo, 1:
246-47.
148 The rehabilitation was enacted in two resolutions of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet,
December 6, 1963, and April 29, 1964. GARF, f. 7523, op. 109, d. 195, 11.38-39.
149 Porfirii Gavrutto, Tutchinad gorodorn(Moscow, 1968), 165-66. For an extensive documentation
of the affair, including Khrushchev'sspeech and the rebuttal by Moisei Kogan, the falsely accused Jew,
see Pinkus, Soviet Governmenttand the Jews, 76, 127-33, 493, nn. 113-14.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999

1154 Amir Weiner

Perhaps Allilueva got it right. The

ground and first of all within the Party itself."'150
Bolshevik epic had to be purged of its association with the resented minority. By the
eve of the war, popular identification of the revolution with the Jews had already
found its echo inside the party ranks. In the early 1930s, violent peasant protests
against forced collectivization in Ukraine were often directed against the "Jewish
militia" and "communistkikes,"151 and in the midst of the war, a rabid anti-Stalinist
village poet could write:

0 you, Stalin the flayer,

What have you done to us now?
You expelled Ukrainians from their huts,
And Jews became the rulers,
We spend the nights under fences,
We have no father, we have no mothers,
Because you, Stalin-a cruel beast,
Drove them as far as to Siberia,
And to the Jews you gave medals,
so that they could torture us.152

When the party surveyed its rank and file throughout the pre-war years, it
encountered the prevalent perception of Jews as the main beneficiaries of the
October Revolution: holders of the best positions and jobs, owners of the
apartments, and accomplished draft dodgers.153 If the myth of the October
Revolution was perceived as Judaized beyond repair, then the new myth of the
Great Patriotic War would not suffer the same fate.

REFLECTING ON THE HORRIFIC SLAUGHTER consuming Europe at the time, Sigmund

Freud observed in April 1915 that war was merely an instrument that stripped away
illusions and layers of civility, "laying bare the primal man in each of us." The key,
then, to the total barbarization of warfare lay not with the states but with the
community and its individual components, which "no longer raise objections ... to
the suppression of evil passions, and men perpetrate deeds of cruelty, fraud,
treachery and barbarity so incompatible with their level of civilization that one
would have thought them impossible."'154 One could hardly deny the brutalization
of public life triggered by the cataclysmic experience of the Great War, or any other
150 Svetlana Allilueva, Only One Year (New York, 1969), 153. Ironically, this was also the view in
Berlin in early 1937. "Again a show trial in Moscow," Goebbels noted in his diary on January25, 1937.
"This time again exclusively against Jews. Radek, etc. The Fuhrer still in doubt whether there isn't after
all a hidden anti-Semitic tendency. Maybe Stalin does want to smoke the Jews out. The military is also
supposedly strongly anti-Semitic." Cited in Friedlander, Nazi Germnany and the Jews, 185-86.
151 PAVO, f. 136, op. 3, d. 8,11. 113-14; d. 131, 11.1-2; Valerii Vasil'ev, "Krest'ianskievosstaniia na
Ukraine, 1929-1930 gody," Svobodnaia mysl' 9 (1992): 74-75; Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels untderStalin:
Collectivizationand the Cultureof Peasant Resistance (Oxford, 1996), 120-21.
152 TsDAHOU, f. 57, op. 4, d. 356,11. 86.
153 Iurii Larin, Evrei i antise'mitizrn
v SSSR (Moscow, 1929), 241-44; PAVO, f. 136, op. 1, d. 96, 11.
25-26, and op. 3, d. 219, 1. 26.
154 Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," in James Strachey, ed., The
StantdardEdition of the CompletePsychological Worksof SigmundFreud (London, 1957), 14: 275-300.
Here, 280, 299.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999

 NVature,Nurture, and Memoy in a Socialist Utopia 1155

mass, violent conflict for that matter. Categorization and treatment of enemies as
undifferentiated, unreformable, irredeemable, and hence exterminable appear as a
logical consequence from which even Marxist regimes, armed with a sociological
paradigm premised on differentiation, reform, and redemption, could not escape.
Nor were the origins and technologies of Soviet violence divorced from those of
other modern "gardening states." The refusal of the Soviet party-state to recognize
any self-imposed restrictions on its aspirations and practices certainly set it apart
from liberal democracies. Yet this very refusal was rooted in the modern secular
state's assumption of responsibility for the spiritual, social, and physical well-being
of its subjects. With the diminishing power of divine doctrines and their institu-
tional incarnations, such as the Catholic church in the pre-modern era, which had
often contained its violent schemes, the modern state was restrained by and
accountable to none in its drive to remold society and individuals.155
Yet the endurance of Marxist state violence and its constant acceleration in
peacetime pointed to an additional source. As communist regimes shifted gears in
their pursuit of homogenized and harmonious societies, their belief in the
malleability of human nature seemed to wane. In the Soviet Union, those marked
by the party-state as internal enemies after the establishment of socialism were
deemed irreducible, unreformable, and irredeemable elements; and in the heyday
of the Cultural Revolution in China, the "blood pedigree theory" was practiced
under the slogan: "If the father's a hero, the son's a good chap; If the father's a
reactionary, the son's a bad egg."'156Did nurture finally succumb to nature? Not
necessarily. Excision, even when totalized, did not emanate from a genocidal
ideology and was not practiced through exterminatory institutions. Hence commu-
nists repeatedly turned their attention to groups and individuals they had already
engaged pYreviously, an inconceivable practice had these entities been stigmatized a
priori as racially or biologically unfit. Purification did not engage collectives as such
but rather the individuals who comprised them. As the ticking of the Soviet
eschatological clock grew louder, they bore the brunt of an increasingly urgent
quest for purity.
155 On the processes leading to the all-embracingnature of the secular state, see Kedar, "Expulsion
as an Issue of World History"; and Scott, Seeing Like a State, 11-102.
156 White, Policies of Chaos, 222.

Amir Weiner is an assistant professor of history at Stanford University. His

book, Making Sense of War: The Second World Warand the Fate of the Bolshevik
Revolution, completed during his tenure as a National Fellow at the Hoover
Institution, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2000. Currently,
Weiner is at work on a book-length study of the sovietization of the Western
Borderlands, 1939-1989.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1999