Il’ya Al’tman
IN THE WEST, the subject of the Holocaust is shaped by a collective memory of World War II and an aversion to violence and intolerance. In Russia, by contrast, it is the memory of heroism and victimization in the war that shapes views of the Holocaust. One cannot deny that the Russian population is very well aware of the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which is called the Great Patriotic War in Russia. Indeed, the victory over Nazi Germany is much propagandized in Russia. Huge placards hang on the walls of houses, war monuments adorn—or disfigure—many Russian cities, newspapers report, and people discuss the events and personalities of the Great Patriotic War.
But this memory culture of World War II is rather superficial because it leaves out one essential aspect that is intrinsically linked with the war: the Holocaust. As a result, the collective memory of Jewish victims is presented in Russia in a rather fragmented manner. There are both objective and subjective reasons for this. In the occupied Soviet territories, more than seven million civilians were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators.1 Another 20 million died in battles and on the home front, during the occupation and in the siege of Leningrad. The majority of them were non-Jews.
The subject of the Holocaust is still painful in Russia, as in other post-Soviet states. There are several reasons for this. In contrast to Germany and many countries occupied by the Germans, here Jews were killed in the open, and millions of people witnessed it. Local collaborators were actively involved in persecuting and murdering Jews. The property of Jews was given to their neighbors. Nevertheless, with a minor exception, Soviet propaganda, history, and literature stubbornly defended the position that all Soviet people, and above all Slavs, were equally victimized by the Nazis. As Prof. Zvi Gitelman has noted, what was denied in the USSR was not that the Holocaust was an historical fact, but that it was exceptional.2 This approach is shared by many in Russia today.
Only in recent years has Russian society begun to understand the Holocaust. This long, complicated process can be explained in several ways. First, during the war, Soviet propaganda emphasized that the Nazis targeted Slavic peoples. This pragmatic approach by the Kremlin ensured enthusiasm and self-sacrifice on the part of those who were fighting against Germany. Second, antisemitism was state ideology from the late 1940s until the beginning of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. The suffering of Jewish victims did not fit with the ideology of a struggle against world Zionism. Third, there were few studies on the fate of Soviet people living in the occupied territories or on collaboration. Writing on the occupation was subject to particularly rigid censorship.
The fate of the Black Book is characteristic for this silencing of the Holocaust. This is a collection of essays and documents on the destruction of the Soviet Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators, which was prepared under this name in the years 1943–1947 in the USSR and the United States. The preparation of the book in the USSR was conducted by the Jewish Antifascist Committee, and the Literary Commission was headed first by Il’ya Ehrenburg, and then by Vasily Grossman. The idea of publishing the Black Book belonged to the outstanding scientist Albert Einstein and the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Scholars, and Artists. The Black Book is the first joint Soviet-American historical documentary project, but its origins have not yet been sufficiently uncovered. It addressed the entire occupied territory of the USSR and included various aspects of the Holocaust: destruction, salvation, spiritual and physical resistance. In the foreword of Vasily Grossman, written in 1946, a general picture of the Holocaust in the USSR was given and its scale was indicated, perhaps for the first time. The book was prepared on a strictly documentary basis, using the numerous collected sources. In the first edition, any mention of collaborators was cut out, and in the penultimate version, everything that pertained to Jewish self-consciousness was excluded. This volume was presented at the Nuremberg trials but in 1947, its publication was forbidden in the Soviet Union. Later, the initiative and involvement in creating this book figured in the 1952 indictment of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
These documents have since appeared in several publications. In 1993, the first complete edition of the Black Book was prepared by Il’ya Al’tman. It included almost sixty pages that the book’s editors had expunged from the 1945–1947 manuscript.3 Also in 1993, the Moscow publishing house Text issued a collection of documents entitled The Unknown Black Book.4 It included material that the editors of the Black Book had rejected for fear of the censors. In 2008, this volume was published in English by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.5 In 2014–2015 the Moscow publishing house Corpus issued a revised text of these publications with our detailed comments.6 The publication was financed by crowdfunding, collected in the internet on the initiative of the publishing house. Around 500 notes were written for the new editions of the Black Book and the Unknown Black Book, many of them biographical. Unlike previous editions, this book appeared in bookshops in all major Russian cities from Arkhangelsk to Vladivostok. This publication caused a public response in the form of reviews, radio programs, and interviews. Several presentations took place both in Russia and in other countries.
At the beginning of the 1990s the renowned American Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg noted that the opening of previously unknown Soviet archives would influence Holocaust research. Symptomatically, his last book was devoted to sources available for use in Holocaust research.7 Among the important collections of archival documents from former Soviet archives that have not been the subject of special analysis, we shall emphasize here the “Statements (akty) about the atrocities of fascist aggressors.” They are stored in the collection of the Main Political Administration of the Red Army (GlavPUR RKKA), in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (TsAMO RF).8 The stamp “confidential” was removed from most of these documents only in 2010–2011, owing to the preparation of a documentary collection entitled The Red Army and the Holocaust, which will be produced by the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center together with the Yad Vashem Research Institute. Altogether, we revealed approximately one hundred files numbering more than 4,000 pages of documents on the subject.
These documents can be divided into some lexical sets, according to origin, and by types of sources. Among them there are enemy documents and testimonies of prisoners of war (military personnel of the Wehrmacht and the Romanian army); reports by political departments of the Red Army of atrocities committed by the invaders both on the territory of the USSR and in Nazi-occupied Europe; propaganda materials of the Red Army, including information on the Holocaust and the analysis of the reasons for Germany’s antisemitism; personal collections (letters and diaries of Jews from the occupied territories) found after the liberation; testimonies of escaped Soviet prisoners of war about the execution of their Jewish comrades; photographs taken by German military personnel.
Letters and diaries of German soldiers and officers often abound with openly antisemitic motives.9 They write publicly about mass executions of Jews and their personal participation in them. Testimonies of captured German prisoners of war provide similar information, but from an eyewitness’s point of view. In many cases, specific names of executioners are mentioned. However, these testimonies were provided two to three years after the events and they are very short and abrupt.
The largest type of sources preserved in TsAMO includes statements about German atrocities. They were recorded already in the first months after the beginning of the war. They are particularly valuable as they appeared eighteen months before similar statements collected by the Extraordinary State Commission (СhGK). This enabled the army’s political staff and lawyers to interrogate those eyewitnesses who no longer lived in the given settlements in 1943–1944 when the ChGK statements were made.
Written in the most complicated of conditions, immediately after or prior to the fighting, these documents are striking in their details. They specify precise sites of execution; make reference to the names of witnesses and eyewitnesses; contain detailed citations from their testimonies. Of special interest are statements made in connection with the liberation of prisoners from the main factories of death, Auschwitz and Majdanek. Angry reactions on the part of Soviet military personnel to Nazi crimes are reflected even in otherwise emotionless Soviet documentation.
It is natural that the Holocaust was not unique and not even the main object of these documents. The fate of POWs and violence against women were central in the statements made since summer 1941. But they nonetheless served as a basis for the Holocaust to be reflected in military newspapers and special propaganda volumes published from the first months of the war onward.
The special bulletin issued by the section of information of the Seventh Department of GlavPUR dated September 20, 1944, contained a letter by a Jewish woman, Salomea Oks. In the foreword, it was stated that it “was kept by the inhabitant of Ternopol, and after the liberation of the city by the Red Army, it was sent by her to the addressee, in Tel Aviv. The letter was written in Polish, the publication has only insignificant stylistic changes.” The letter was written in Ternopol on April 7, 1943, and completed in two sittings—on April 23 and 26, 1943. It was addressed to the Lichtblau family in Tel Aviv. The author describes the destruction of her family and all prisoners of a ghetto from July 1941. Here are some passages from this farewell letter:
My dear,
Departing from life, I wish to leave to you, my loved ones, some lines. . . . I wish to tell you so much! But what language can one use to describe tortures . . . It is impossible. . . . Alas, we shall not survive to take revenge; it will be left to you! . . . I cannot write further. I cannot! It is possible to fill in lots of pages and all the same, you won’t understand!
It is not easy to say goodbye forever, but we expect the future and we shall face death with proud laughter. Be happy, farewell. Do not forget about revenge and if you can—avenge us! Musia10
Analysis of the documents in the published collection The Red Army and the Holocaust allows us to make a number of important conclusions about their value as a historical source. First, they testify that military personnel of the Red Army involved in fighting against German and Romanian invaders, as well as in liberating European states and death camps, knew a great deal about the crimes committed by the Nazis against Jews, including Soviet prisoners of war.
Second, from the first weeks of the war, these crimes by the Nazis and their collaborators became the subject of special monitoring in statements and political reports, including collection, translation, and analysis of captured German and Romanian documents (letters, diaries, photos). Political departments of the Red Army were the first in Europe to regularly collect and publish data about the Holocaust and other crimes committed by the invaders. They began this work almost eighteen months before the ChGK began its activity. This experience was later used and developed by the ChGK, whose bodies only started to produce similar statements and to collect the testimony of eyewitnesses and victims from March 1943.
After the ChGK commenced its work, the army’s political departments at all levels continued to monitor the crimes of the invaders from the first hours after the liberation of Soviet territories. The ChGK came to work several months later when a number of witnesses, especially enlistable men, were no longer present. ChGK statements were largely based on the reports and statements made by the Red Army. Of special value was a thorough reporting on execution sites, the location of tombs, and identifying marks close by. In all instances, these documents passed from a regiment to the Main Political Administration of the RKKA. They were then duplicated, included in military surveys and propaganda materials, and reproduced in army publications and special chapters about Nazi atrocities.
Statements about Nazi atrocities were not only of huge academic value, as they disclose unknown facts, names of victims and perpetrators, and dates of executions, but also constitute the major proof against Holocaust deniers. Of special significance are the diaries written during the war and narrative sources (both Soviet and German), which reflect the psychological conditions of perpetrators and victims, as well as the fighting spirit of Red Army soldiers.
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Among other groups of sources actively explored in contemporary Russia and in the post-Soviet states, we shall highlight here the press in the occupied territories. More than 400 newspapers, each of which paid special attention to antisemitic propaganda, were published under Nazi control. These press publications shaped an image of the Jew as the enemy of all other peoples of the USSR, responsible for the crimes of the Bolshevik regime. The press also published important statistical data about the national composition of the population in the occupied territories, anti-Jewish activities taking place all over the world, including the creation of a ghetto in Shanghai and even the information on the suppression of the revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto. Thus, the reader in the occupied territories received indirect information on Jewish resistance across Europe.
In recent years, revealing new facts have been made available about Jewish refugees and émigrés, connected with the Soviet Union, and, in particular, about the proposal Germany made to the USSR to admit “all Reich Jews,” made at the beginning of 1940 and rejected by the Soviet government.11
Of great interest is the data on the transport of several thousand refugees from Lithuania via the USSR to Japan in late 1940, and early 1941. As is known, visas were given to refugees by the Japanese Consul in Kaunas, Chiune Sugihara. But only recently did we learn from declassified documents from the Archives of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation about the role played by the Soviet authorities in this episode and the problems the refugees faced when entering Japan.12
It turned out that the transit of refugees through the USSR to Japan was the result of complex political maneuvering. For almost a year, Soviet authorities were involved in solving the problem of the departure from the USSR of Polish Jews in possession of foreign visas and living on Soviet territory. The initiative for the travel of Jewish refugees through the USSR in 1939 came from the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The government of Lithuania inquired about transit through Odessa to Haifa for several thousand Polish Jews who had received their visas before World War II and appeared in Vilna (under the Soviet-German pact this city and the Vilna district had been given to Lithuania). The Lithuanian side suggested that if any kind of difficultly should arise because some Jews had former Polish passports, then the Lithuanian government would be prepared to give them documents for passage under its own authority.
The Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Mayski, was approached by the chief rabbi of Palestine, who requested assistance in the transit of students from the Jewish Ecclesiastical Seminary near Vilna. The chief rabbi declared he would be ready to offset all the costs related to the passage of the seminary students and teachers and indicated that the British government would support this action. Mayski not only promised assistance but also expressed the readiness of the Soviet side to cover the expenses incurred by their travel. It was planned to carry out the transportation of 5,000 passengers through the Kaunas branch of Intourist. Japanese visas were not needed for such a transit. However, this proposal of the Ministry of Lithuanian Foreign Affairs, like numerous other proposals made by Lithuanian diplomats in Moscow, was rejected until the spring of 1940 by People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov.
The situation fundamentally changed when on April 21, 1940, Molotov was approached by his deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, who had only recently been appointed to the positions of Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs and Head of External Investigation, and was also the Kremlin’s future envoy to Soviet-occupied Lithuania. Referring to the consent of the powerful People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs and the initiative of the Inturist agency, responsible for arranging visits to the USSR by tourists from other countries, Dekanozov developed a very interesting economic argument: “The total number of Jews wishing to pass by transit through the USSR amounts to around 3,000–5,000 from Lithuania and a few thousand Jews from Latvia. ‘Inturist’ indicated that by organizing this transit, it would receive nine hundred thousand rubles in hard currency.” Dekanozov mentioned twice in his letter that the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs offered no opposition to the transit of the aforementioned Jews through the USSR to Palestine, since they would be dispatched through Soviet territory in special groups accompanied by guards.
He also noted that transit through the USSR could only be permitted by persons having the necessary visa for entry into Palestine. The majority of Jews who hoped to leave for Palestine had these visas. They all had in their possession either former Polish passports (with Palestinian visas), or statements given to them by British consulates and possibly also documents issued by local authorities in the Baltic countries.
The letter concluded with the words that under existing circumstances transit through the USSR was not only the shortest but also the safest way of moving these Jews to Palestine. It is possible that Inturist was authorized to organize the transport itself of Jews to Palestine through the USSR, and to reach agreements directly with the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or NKVD), the People’s Commissariat of Railways and the People’s Commissar of the Maritime Fleet about the logistical details of this undertaking.
The fate of these Jews was positively resolved some months later when Dekanozov appeared in Lithuania, which in the meantime had become part of the Soviet Union. The refugees were no longer to be transported southward into the Middle East, but rather they would head to the Far East as foreign tourists and refugees. The journey would take them through Moscow by railroad and then all the way to Vladivostok with a symbolic stop in the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan.
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The last decade has seen several new trends in Holocaust studies in Russia. First, there are more scholarly works and memoirs. Some of them have been published in the Russian provinces, including in cities that were not occupied by the Germans (St. Petersburg, Vologda, Yaroslavl, and Chelyabinsk). In recent years, Jewish communities in Orel and Rostov-on-Don, and local researchers in Taganrog, Pyatigorsk, Nevel, and Pskov have become involved in preparing books and chapters on the Holocaust. Only two doctoral theses (kandidatskie) were defended on the Holocaust in the North Caucasus (Elena Voitenko) and Nazi persecution policies toward German Jews (Elena Andreeva). There are several reasons for this: the funding problems for students, the lack of academics to supervise these PhDs, underestimation of the topic of Holocaust history itself, and so on. These works are largely descriptive rather than analytical. Also noteworthy are works by Prof. Boris Kovalev from the University of Novgorod dealing with collaboration; he studies anti-Jewish propaganda in the German-controlled press, theater, and radio in the occupied areas. Here we can also mention the works of Dmitry Zhukov and Ivan Kovtun.13
Second, works by foreign researchers have been translated into Russian. In contrast to Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania, few readers in Russia are aware of works by some of the most prominent Holocaust researchers writing in English and not translated into Russian (for example, Hilberg, Berenbaum, Michman). In 2005, one of the most prestigious Russian publishers ROSSPEN issued the book Holocaust edited by Walter Laqueur (originally published by Yale University Press in 2001), but this has proven to be the exception rather than the rule.
In 2009, with support from the Russian State Scientific Fund and other organizations, ROSSPEN published the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust on the Territory of the Soviet Union.14 This was the biggest project of the Russian Holocaust Center. It brought together almost a hundred scholars from fifteen Russian universities to write more than 2,000 chapters on specific localities. There are also more than 300 thematic chapters dealing with literature, poetry, theater, cinema, and so on. All of them relate to the Holocaust of Soviet Jews or the fates of the citizens of other countries (victims and perpetrators) on Soviet territory. Many of these chapters are entirely original contributions, because at the time when they appeared, nothing else had been written on these topics.
The Encyclopedia summarizes Holocaust research by Russian scholars and their colleagues in the post-Soviet states. It was particularly important for general Holocaust statistics to establish the number of Holocaust victims on Soviet territory. Thanks to the studies of Russian scholars (Mark Kupovetsky and myself) and an Israeli scholar (Yitzhak Arad), it was ascertained that more than 2.8 million Jews were killed on the territory of the former Soviet Union or deported to death camps between 1941 and 1945. Another three hundred thousand Jews were deported from Germany and German-occupied Europe to this region and then murdered. These numbers make up nearly 50 percent of the total number of killed Jews during World War II. Moreover, in this region there were 800 ghettos, in which about 2 million Jews had to live. About 1,000 ghettos and camps were set up on Soviet territory,15 a higher number than in any other country occupied by the Nazis and their allies.
These numbers were determined through the comprehensive analysis and juxtaposition of German and official Soviet data about the number of victims. These statistics are also important in order to assess the number of Holocaust victims in Poland, Romania, and Lithuania. Many works by Israeli and Western historians overlook the fact that by June 1941, Jews who had previously lived in eastern Poland, Bukovina, and Bessarabia already had Soviet citizenship.
The (partial) opening of Soviet archives, and the work done by Russian and foreign researchers made it possible to prove that the total annihilation of Jews (including children, women, and old men, the eradication of entire communities) began on the territory of the Soviet Union. A contrasting version is the claim that the Holocaust had already begun much earlier, at the beginning of World War II or even as early as the pogroms of November 1938. Holocaust victims constitute over 40 percent of all peaceful Soviet citizens killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. Up to the end of 1941, the vast majority of the Germans’ victims were Jews and Soviet prisoners of war.
In 1942–1944, when the partisan movement intensified, Nazis and their helpers used the experiences gained from the anti-Jewish operations in their reprisal measures. The universality of the Holocaust is usually demonstrated by pointing to the late twentieth–century genocides. Meanwhile, methods and forms of destruction of the civilian population, used against Jews and, in part, Roma (without the propagandistic component), were applied on the occupied territory of the Soviet Union against the civilians of other nationalities: shooting of hostages, incorporation into antiguerrilla operations, and so on.
It seems self-evident that the Holocaust is an integral component of the history of World War II on Soviet territory. However, the Holocaust is dealt with only cursorily in Russian academic journals. Indeed, many authors’ approach to the subject of Jewish victims has changed only formally. Jews are not placed in a separate category of victims (only “especially cruel persecutions of them” are mentioned); and the number of victims of the Holocaust—and this term is not always used in the scholarly and educational literature—in the USSR is significantly diminished. It is connected with the Soviet (now Russian) tradition of considering the total number of victims; in this case, 27 million Soviet people are hardly compared with the 6 million Jews in public consciousness. The only exceptions are studies by Gennady Kostyrchenko and Pavel Polian,16 which deal with important aspects of the Kremlin’s policy toward the Holocaust and Holocaust memory in the USSR during and after the war. Polian also investigated the fate of the Soviet Jewish prisoners of war, payments to Holocaust survivors, and Holocaust denial.17 Maria Al’tman’s book about Holocaust denial in Russia was also devoted to the same problem.18 The book demonstrates that at the turn of the century Russia became the center of Holocaust denial by virtue of publications of both individual titles and translated editions. The book examines the main arguments of the deniers and provides counterevidence by actively using facts from the trial of David Irving.
The history of the Holocaust on the territory of the Russian Federation is the least studied in the post-Soviet and Western historiography. This is the only Soviet republic on which there is no special, separate research. Currently underway is the publication in English of Kiril Feferman’s doctoral thesis on the history of the Holocaust in Crimea and the North Caucasus,19 and Vadim Dubson’s chapter concerning the history of ghettos in Central Russia.20 The only chapter that previously handled the subject was published by myself in English in 2005.21
Nazis and their collaborators killed Jews in all of Russia’s twenty-three occupied districts, territories, and republics (within the contemporary Russian borders). The total number of victims (including evacuees) was about 145,000 (excluding the Crimea and the Kaliningrad districts). But till now, Western and Israeli scholarship cite figures ranging from “several dozen thousands” to one hundred thousand persons for the number of victims.22
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) was the biggest Soviet republic—in terms of the length of its borders, from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea—occupied by the Germans. The RSFSR was the only republic occupied only partially by the Nazis. Its largest centers with the biggest Jewish population (first of all, Moscow and Leningrad) were not occupied by the Germans. Two hundred thousand Jews lived on the territory of the RSFSR (including the Crimea) before the Nazi occupation.
Russia was the last Soviet republic to be occupied by the Germans (with the exception of several eastern Ukrainian districts). As a result, its Jewish population was better informed about the Holocaust and had more chance to survive by escaping eastward. At the same time, many Jews from Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, as well as Leningrad, Moscow, and other Russian cities were evacuated to areas of Russia later occupied, notably the North Caucasus. From mid-October to December 1941, 300,653 Jews were transported there. Tens of thousands of them did not manage to evacuate in 1942. Only the central areas of Russia could be reached by refugees from Belarus, the Baltic republics, Ukraine, and Moldova in 1941. All in all, no less than 155,000–160,000 Jews found themselves under the German occupation in Russia.
All occupied Russian territory—and herein lies its main peculiarity—was in a zone of military, not civilian control, in immediate proximity to the front line. Various groups of armies and SS Einsatzgruppen operated here, and this affected Jewish policies and the ways Jews were eliminated. On the occupied Russian territory, Nazi theorists and experts had to solve the problem of Jewishness of Karaites, Mountain Jews (tats), and Krymchaks. The last group was recognized as Jews and killed. But Karaites professing Judaism, as well as a proportion of the Mountain Jews, were not targeted by the Germans.
Jewish children from mixed marriages were usually viewed as Jews if their father was the Jew. But often all Jewish children from such marriages were regarded as Jews. During resettlement to a ghetto or the first executions, exemptions were sometimes made for women with children whose husbands were non-Jews (e.g., in Stavropol). All these exceptional cases were handled by local police bodies.
The number of Holocaust victims in Russia (without Crimea) amounts to not less than 145,000 people.23 In this respect, more Jews were destroyed in four other Soviet republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Lithuania. But the figure for Russia exceeds the Holocaust death toll in many European countries, including France, the Netherlands, and Greece. Unlike the Baltic republics, Moldova, Ukraine, and western Belarus, in Russia the local population did not initiate Jewish pogroms. At the same time, members of police formations were actively involved in the implementation of the persecution and destruction of Jews.
The Holocaust on Russian territory cannot be understood and assessed outside of the general context of Nazi population and occupation policies in the USSR. In the central and western regions of Russia, these policies were especially severe, unlike in the North Caucasus in 1942–1943.
Thus, the peculiarities of the Holocaust in Russia are:
Thus, the USSR was consistent and persistent in granting the opportunity to several thousand Jews to leave the territory of the Soviet Union, while, at the same time, refusing to admit their emigration from Nazi Germany. But this help to the Jewish refugees was local, allowing them to remain on Soviet territory, but not to enter it. The Soviet government (along with the western democracies) bears full responsibility for their indifferent attitude to the fate of the Jews of Germany and countries occupied by her in 1940.26
Holocaust researchers in Russia face numerous problems. Many collections of documents from departmental archives (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, special services, the Presidential Archives) are only partially available to historians. As noted above, Russian academics often overlook the Holocaust, including works that concern Nazi ideology, policy, and practice. Furthermore, in those cases where the destruction of the Jews is mentioned, the number of victims is considerably diminished. This was the case, for example, regarding a book published in 2010 and edited by one of the most well-known Russian historians of World War II, Oleg Rzheshevski. He spoke of about seven hundred thousand Jewish victims on the territory of the USSR.27
Holocaust denial has become a separate feature of the historiography in Russia. Dozens of Russian-language internet sites maintain that the Holocaust is a myth. “Our contemporary” (Nash sovremennik)28 and some other popular sites express the view that the subject of the Holocaust is not important in modern Russia and that any reference to it belittles the exploits of the Red Army and all other Soviet victims of the Great Patriotic War. Popular newspapers publish opinion pieces written by professional historians and teachers to the effect that “Russia has nothing to do with the Holocaust,”29 and that it is not necessary to teach this subject at Russian schools and universities. Holocaust denial in modern Russia is one of the worst forms of antisemitism. The book The Holocaust Scam, written by the Swiss teacher, Jürgen Graf, who is assumed to be currently living in Moscow, was published in Russia.30 Its circulation so far is about two hundred thousand copies and it is found on many nationalist internet sites.
The arguments of Holocaust deniers penetrate the popular as well as scholarly presses, appearing in such well-known Russian publishing houses as Eksmo and Yauza. Their authors maintain that they do not deny the Holocaust, but only that it did not take place on the territory of the USSR and beyond that on a much smaller scale than other historians have argued. The destruction of the Soviet Jews, they maintain, was a myth organized by Zionists to intimidate Jews of other countries. Soviet Jews were not killed, they say, but instead left for Palestine and the United States. Consequently, there were no death camps or gas chambers.31
Holocaust remembrance is rarely a feature of the Russian public discourse. Hushing up the Jewish tragedy for almost fifty years had an impact on Russian society, its educational structures, historical institutions, and intellectual environment. This reactionary and revisionist impact is stronger than elsewhere in the post-Soviet European space. It is small wonder that Russia still has no Holocaust Remembrance Day, although it was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz. Indeed, far from memorializing the Jewish tragedy, government officials in Rostov decided to take down a memorial plaque that was erected in 2004, identifying most of the 27,000 victims of the Zmievskaya Balka massacre as Jews. The replacement plaque does not mention Jews, but rather peaceful citizens of Rostov-on-Don and Soviet prisoners of war. One of the major, although not the most important, motives behind this decision was the reluctance to mention the term Holocaust on the plaque, while Jews here were not gassed but shot.
Unfortunately, Russia is not a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The Russian Holocaust Center’s international cooperation network is an essential component of the connections forged by this organization with Russia. Further international cooperation in studying, teaching, and memorializing the Holocaust is necessary.
To sum up, national Holocaust Remembrance Day still does not exist in Russia despite all the attempts of the Russian Holocaust Center and Jewish organizations to implement it based on the fact that Russia has ratified the United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 on November 1, 2005 about commemorating the tragedy of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, since 2015 the Government of Moscow, the Russian Jewish Congress, and the Russian Holocaust Center have organized the annual Week of Remembrance. This is a series of memorial and educational events marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The highlight of this series of cultural and educational events is the evening requiem held in the prestigious halls of Moscow. Guests of these events include representatives from the political, social, and religious spheres, ambassadors and diplomats from more than twenty-five countries, as well as World War II veterans and former ghetto prisoners, teachers, and students. The official part includes welcome speeches by government representatives of the Russian Federation. The Week of Remembrance is widely covered in the media.
Since 2015, some aspects of the Holocaust have become relevant in the political discourse. The Holocaust assumed its place in the state struggle against the rehabilitation of Nazism. The topic of the Holocaust appeared in state educational programs. For example, International Holocaust Remembrance Day was integrated for the first time into the calendar for educational institutions’ measures. By 2017, the number of regions and cities that officially commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day throughout Russia had risen to 143 and included sixty-three out of eighty-five Russian regions. Moreover, a program for commemorating Holocaust victims began in the framework of the project “Return Dignity,” which resulted in the installation of fifty monuments at the sites of mass killings of Jews, covering a distance of more than 1,600 kilometers.
Comprehension of the Holocaust commemoration experience is in demand for the commemoration of other tragedies, such as the Armenian genocide and the tragedy in Beslan. In 2015, the International Forum “Holocaust: 70 Years Later” was held, and different problems of the Holocaust, genocides, and terror were discussed in the context of historical memory. This provided a basis for the creation in 2016 of the first International Educational and Research Center of the Holocaust and Genocides at the Russian State University for the Humanities. Problems of studying and teaching the history of antisemitism, the Holocaust and genocides of the twentieth century are among the issues explored by the Center.
IL’YA AL’TMAN is Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, as well as founder and co-chairman of the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center. His many books on the Holocaust in the USSR include Zhertvy nenavisti: Kholokost v SSSR 1941–1945 gg. (2002, German ed. 2008), Kholokost i evreiskoe soprotivlenie na okkupirovannoi territorii SSSR (2002), The Unknown Black Book (ed. with Joshua Rubenstein, 2008), and, as editor-in-chief, Kholokost na territorii SSSR: Entsiklopediia (2009).
1. This data was first published in 1991 in the book by B. V. Sokolov, Tsena pobedy. Velikaia Otechestvennaia: neizvestnoe ob izvestnom (Moscow: Moskovskiy rabochii, 1991), 7, 13–15, and 19. In 1998 it was repeated in volume 4 of the multivolume history “Great Patriotic War” prepared by several institutions of the Russian Academy of Science. Usually these figures are mentioned in general calculations of Soviet human losses during the war, including textbooks, ranging from 12 to 15 million peaceful Soviet citizens.
2. Zvi Gitelman, “Soviet reactions to the Holocaust, 1945–1991,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945, ed. Lucian Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurok (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 4.
3. Il’ya Ehrenburg and Vasiliy Grossman, eds., Chernaya kniga (Vilnius: Yad, 1993); reprinted in Germany, the United States, and other countries.
4. Il’ya Al’tman, Shmuel Krakowski, Yitzhak Arad, and Tatyana Pavlova, eds., Neizvestnaya chernaya kniga (Moscow: GARF, 1993).
5. Joshua Rubinstein and Il’ya Al’tman, eds., The Unknown Black Book (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
6. Il’ya Ehrenburg and Vasiliy Grossman, eds., Chernaya kniga (Moscow: CORPUS, 2015); Il’ya Al’tman, ed., Neizvestnaya “Chernaya kniga.” Materialy k “Chernoy knige” pod redaktsiyey Vasiliya Grossmana i Il’ya Erenburga (Moscow: AST Corpus, 2015).
7. Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 2001), 196.
8. Central Archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense (hereafter TsAMO RF), f. 32 (GlavPUR), inv. 11302.
9. Examples are provided in Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 107–108, 159, and 211–212; Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2010), 105–107, 131–132, and 156–157.
10. TsAMO RF, f. 32, inv. 11306, case 544, L. 361–366. See also “Maariv,” April 18, 2012, 1 (Hebrew).
11. Dr. Gennady Kostyrchenko was the first to use these documents.
12. For further reading on this see I. A. Al’tman, “The Issuance of Visas to War Refugees by Chiune Sugihara as Reflected in the Documents Stored in Russian Archives,” in Casablanca of the North: Refugees and Rescuers in Kaunas, 1939–1940, ed. I. A. Al’tman (Kaunas: Versus Aureus, 2017), 133–139.
13. D. A. Zhukov and I. I. Kovtun, 29-ya Grenaderskaya Diviziya SS “Kaminskii” (Moscow: Veche, 2009); D. A. Zhukov and I. I. Kovtun, Russkaya politsiya (Moscow: Veche, 2010); D. A. Zhukov and I. I. Kovtun, Russkie esesovtsy (Moscow: Veche, 2013).
14. Il’ya Al’tman, ed., Kholokost na territorii SSSR: Entsiklopediia, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011 [2009]).
15. See Il’ya Al’tman, Zhertvy nenavisti. Kholokost v SSSR 1941–1945 gg. (Moscow: Fond Kovcheg, 2002).
16. G. V. Kostyrchenko, Stalinskii Sovetskii Souz I Kholokost // Kholokost: istoriya I pamyati, in Proceedings of the international academic conference at Budapest University, December 2–3, 2005, ed. T. Kraus (Budapest: Maguar Ruszisztikai Intézet, 2006), 145–153; Pavel Polian, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur. Ostarbeitery i voennoplennye v Tretyem Reikhe i ikh repatriatsia, 2nd rev. and exp. ed. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002 [1996]).
17. Alfred Koch and Pavel Polian, Otritsanie otritsaniya, ili Bitva pod Aushvitsem Debaty o demografii i geopolitike Kholokosta (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2008).
18. M. M. Al’tman, Otritsanie Kholokosta v Rossii: istoriya I sovremennie tendentsii (Moscow: Fond “Kholokost”/Journalistic and Publishing Agency “JAG-VM,” 2001).
19. Kiril Feferman “The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus” (PhD thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2008).
20. Vadim Dubson, “Getto na okkupirovannoi territorii Rossiiskoi Federatsii (1941–1942),” Vestnik evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve 21, 3 (2000): 157–184.
21. Il’ya Al’tman, “Holocaust in the Territory of the Russian Federation,” in Facing the Nazi Genocide: Non-Jews and Jews in Europe, ed. Beate Kosmala and Feliks Tych (Berlin: Metropol, 2005), 169–203.
22. Sara Bender and Pearl Weiss, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, Europe (Part II) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2011), LXXIV.
23. Al’tman, Zhertvy nenavisti; Al’tman, ed., Kholokost na territorii SSSR.
24. Gennady Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 1995).
25. For further reading on this see Mordechai Altshuler, Yitzhak Arad, and Shmuel Krakowski, eds., Sovetskiye yevrei pishut Ilye Ehrenburgu, 1943–1966 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1993).
26. Il’ya Al’tman, Kholokost i evreiskoe soprotivlenie na okkupirovannoi territorii SSSR (Moscow: Kaleidoskop, 2002).
27. O. A. Rzheshevsky and Y.A. Nikiforov, Velikaya Otechestvennaya voina, anniversary edition (Moscow: Olma Media Group, 2010).
28. Chronologically, the most recent works in this genre were the chapters by Stanislav Kunyayev, “Zhretsy i zhertvy Kholokosta,” Nash sovremennik 1–10 (2010). In 2012, they were published in book format by Algorithm, Moscow.
29. Komsomolskaya Pravda, May 7, 2009.
30. Jürgen Graf, Mif o Kholokoste (Moscow: “Russkiy vestnik,” 1996).
31. This trend appeared first in the USSR after the Six-Day War in the so-called anti-Zionist literature.