The holocaust in the soviet mirror∗

Theblack bookand the Holocaust

“…74 The reasons behind homogenizing the numbers of the Final Solution with those of the Great Patriotic War cannot be definitively determined because Party policy was not always clear or consistent. 75 non-Jewish fatalities in the Soviet Union made the contrast between Jewish and non-Jewish deaths less sharp than in Western countries. Also, there was an ideological propensity to see all civilian murders as a consequence of racist fascism (a degenerate form of capitalism).…”

Chapter 4. Jews as Cossacks: A Symbiosis in Literature and Life

“…The Cossack-Jewish trope appears also in the writings of Shmuel Gordon (1909Gordon ( -1998, a writer of the same generation as Khaim Melamud (1907-1993). 9 In one of Gordon's stories, several Jewish collective farmers from Crimea survived the German occupation, hiding in a Kuban Cossack stanitsa.…”

“…In other words, it is important not to confuse two essentially different agendas: first, that of Soviet Jews, who intentionally or unwittingly found themselves in the Red Army; second, that of Soviet Jewish-most notably Yiddish-writers who portrayed the events of the Great Patriotic War. While personal agendas might have specifically Jewish elements, such as setting an example of Jewish bravery or using the military career as a route to complete assimilation, Soviet Jewish writers "combine [d] writing about the Holocaust in the strict sense of the word with writing about resistance" 60 and sought to emphasize heroism in their Jewish characters. Cavalrymen appear in their oeuvre as one of the ultimate symbols of Jewish heroic resistance.…”

Memory, Kinship, and the Mobilization of the Dead: The Russian State and the “Immortal Regiment” Movement

“…Literaturnaia gazeta's editor-in-chief Yurii Poliakov has claimed that anti-Russian policies in Poland and Ukraine today are being promoted by "Pilsudski's grandchildren" and the descendants of Banderites (cited in Kuz'mina 2015). This rhetoric gains credence partly through the history of Soviet propaganda on Western governments as the heirs to Nazism (on which see Hirszowicz 1993), from which the key images and tropes are borrowed, adapted, and also applied to critics of the Putin regime more broadly, stigmatizing them as descendants of Nazi collaborators.…”