Bloodlands

In January 1948, Stalin was killing a Jew. Solomon Mikhoels, the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the director of the Moscow Yiddish Theater, had been sent to Minsk to judge a play for the Stalin Prize. Once arrived, he was invited to the country house of the head of the Soviet Belarusian state police, Lavrenty Tsanava, who had him murdered, along with an inconvenient witness. Mikhoels’s body, crushed by a truck, was left on a quiet street.

Minsk had seen the ruthless German mass murder of Jews only a few years before. The irony of the Soviets killing one more Soviet Jew in Minsk would not have been lost on Tsanava, a policeman-cum-historian. He was finishing a history of the Belarusian partisan movement, which ignored the special plight and struggle of the Jews under German occupation. A Soviet history of Jewish partisans had been written, but would be suppressed. The Jews had suffered more than anyone else in Minsk during the war; it seemed that liberation by the Soviets had not brought the suffering of Soviet Jews to an end. It also seemed that the history of the Holocaust in the USSR would remain unwritten.¹

Mikhoels had stood for issues that Stalin wanted to avoid. He was personally acquainted with people of Jewish origin in Stalin’s immediate milieu, such as the politburo member Lazar Kaganovich and the wives of politburo members Viacheslav Molotov and Kliment Voroshilov. What was worse, Mikhoels had sought to reach Stalin in order to communicate with him about the fate of the Jews during the war. Like Vasily Grossman, Mikhoels had been a member of the Soviet Union’s official Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the war. Mikhoels had worked, at Stalin’s instructions, to bring the plight of Soviet Jews to the attention of the world—in order to raise money for the Soviet war effort. After the war, Mikhoels found himself unable to let the mass murder of the Jews pass into historical oblivion, and unwilling to submerge the special suffering of the Jews into that of Soviet peoples generally. In September 1945 he had brought ashes from Babi Yar in a crystal vase to a lecture in Kiev, and had continued in the years after the war to speak openly of the death pits. Mikhoels also petitioned Stalin’s propaganda chief Andrei Zhdanov in 1947 to allow the publication of the Black Book of Soviet Jewry, a collection of documents and testimonies about the mass killing edited by Grossman, Ilya Ehrenburg, and others. This was in vain. The Zhdanov era in Soviet culture could not endorse a Jewish history of the war. In the postwar Soviet Union, memorial obelisks could not have Stars of David, only five-pointed red stars. In the western Soviet Union, in the lands the Soviets annexed during and again after the war, in the lands where some 1.6 million Jews were killed, monuments to Lenin were raised on pedestals built from Jewish tombstones. The synagogue where the Kovel Jews had left their final messages was being used to store grain.²

Svetlana Allilueva, Stalin’s daughter, overheard her father arranging the cover story for the murder with Tsanava: “car accident.” Mikhoels was a person of some stature in Soviet culture, and his political campaigning was unwelcome. Yet Stalin’s hostility toward Mikhoels as a Jew probably had as much to do with patrimony as it did with politics. Stalin’s son Iakov, who died in German captivity, had married a Jew. Svetlana’s first love had been a Jewish actor, whom Stalin called a British spy and sent to the Gulag. Svetlana’s first husband was also Jewish; Stalin called him stingy and cowardly, and forced her to divorce him so that she could marry the son of Zhdanov, Stalin’s purifier of Soviet culture. The match smacked of the founding of a royal family, one that was less Jewish than Svetlana’s own affections. Stalin had always had close collaborators who were Jewish, most notably Kaganovich. Yet now, as he neared seventy years of age, and as concerns about succession must have been growing in his mind, his own attitude about Jews seemed to be shifting.³

After Mikhoels was dead, the Soviet political police, now under the name Ministry of State Security, retroactively provided the reason why the killing was in the Soviet interest: Jewish nationalism. Viktor Abakumov, head of the Ministry (or MGB), concluded in March 1948 that Mikhoels was a Jewish nationalist who had fallen in with dangerous Americans. By Soviet standards, this was an easy enough case to make. Mikhoels had been instructed by the Soviet leadership, as a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the war, to appeal to the national sentiments of Jews. He had traveled in 1943 to the United States to raise money, and there he had made sympathetic remarks about Zionism. By sheer accident, his airplane rested for a few hours on a runway in Palestine, where by his own account he kissed the air of the Holy Land. In February 1944, Mikhoels had joined a campaign to make of the Crimean Peninsula, cleared by the Soviets of supposed Muslim enemies after 1943, a “Jewish socialist republic.” Crimea, on the Black Sea, was a maritime border region of the Soviet Union. The idea that it might serve as a Soviet Jewish homeland had been raised several times, and was supported by some prominent American Jews. Stalin preferred the Soviet solution, Birobidzhan, the Jewish autonomous region deep in the Soviet Far East.⁴

Given the centrality of the Second World War to the experience of all east Europeans, in the USSR and in the new satellite states, everyone in the new communist Europe would have to understand that the Russian nation had struggled and suffered like no other. Russians would have to be the greatest victors and the greatest victims, now and forever. The Russian heartland, perhaps, could be protected from the dangerous West: by the other Soviet republics, and by the new satellite states of eastern Europe. The contradiction here was obvious: those peoples who were forming the buffer had the least reason to accept the Stalinist claim about Russian martyrdom and purity. The case would be a particularly hard one to make in places such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where the Second World War had begun and ended with a Soviet occupation. It would be none too simple in western Ukraine, where nationalist partisans fought the Soviets for years after the war. Poles were unlikely to forget that the Second World War had begun with allied German and Soviet armies invading Poland.

The logical difficulties would be all the greater among Jews. Since the Germans had killed Soviet Jews, then Polish Jews, and then other European Jews, the Holocaust could hardly be contained in any Soviet history of the war—least of all one that moved the center of gravity of suffering east to Russia where relatively few Jews died. It was one thing for Jews to regard the return of Soviet power as liberation, which most did, but quite another for them to recognize precisely because Nazi policy had been to exterminate them. Yet this sense of gratitude, because of its special sources, did not convert automatically into a political legend about a Great Fatherland War and Russia. Jews, after all, had also fought in the Red Army, and had been more likely to have been decorated for bravery than Soviet citizens generally.⁵

The number of Jews killed by the Germans in the Soviet Union was a state secret. The Germans killed about a million native Soviet Jews, plus about 1.6 million more Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian Jews brought into the USSR by the Soviet annexations of 1939 and 1940. The Romanians also killed Jews chiefly on territories that after the war were within the boundaries of the Soviet Union. These numbers were of an obvious sensitivity, since they revealed that, even by comparison with the dreadful suffering of other Soviet peoples, the Jews had suffered a very special fate. Jews were less than two percent of the population and Russians more than half; the Germans had murdered more Jewish civilians than Russian civilians in the occupied Soviet Union. Jews were in a category of their own, even by comparison with the Slavic peoples who had suffered more than the Russians, such as Ukrainians and Belarusians and Poles. The Soviet leadership knew this, and so did Soviet citizens who lived in the lands that the Germans had occupied. But the Holocaust could never become part of the Soviet history of the war.⁶

These high figures of murdered Jews also raised the troubling question of just how the Germans had managed to kill so many civilians in such a short time in the occupied Soviet Union. They had help from Soviet citizens. As everyone with experience of the war knew, the German armies were enormous, but the German occupying forces in the rear were sparse. German civilian authorities and police lacked the numbers to govern the western Soviet Union in any recognizable fashion, let alone to carry out a thorough policy of mass murder. Local officials continued to do their jobs under their new masters, local young men volunteered for the police, and in the ghettos some Jews took on the task of policing the rest. The shootings east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line had implicated, in one way or another, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens. (For that matter, much of the crucial work at the death facilities west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line in occupied Poland had been performed by Soviet citizens. It was unmentionable that Soviet citizens had staffed Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec.) That the Germans needed collaborators, and found them, is not surprising. But collaboration undermined the myth of a united Soviet population defending the honor of the fatherland by resisting the hated fascist invader. Its prevalence was one more reason that the mass murder of the Jews was to be forgotten.

During the war, the Soviets and their allies had been in general agreement that the war was not to be understood as a war of the liberation of Jews. From different perspectives, the Soviet, Polish, American, and British leaderships all believed that Jewish suffering was best understood as one aspect of a generally wicked German occupation. Though Allied leaders were quite aware of the course of the Holocaust, none treated it as a