18 - Collaboration, resistance and liberation in the Balkans, 1941–1945

Summary

Soviet territorial expansion in the decade from 1939 was a violent process. This chapter looks at the practice of Soviet seizure of territory and populations, be it accompanied by liberation from foreign occupation or not. It discusses the three types of violence, namely, troop violence, revolutionary violence and economic violence, and their distribution across all Soviet occupations. The chapter also explores whether the labels 'occupation' or 'liberation' adequately describe the arrival of Red Army troops in a given territory. Outside territory incorporated directly into the Soviet state, violent occupation was embedded even more glaringly into a discourse of liberation. This tension between words and deeds has enabled one of the least helpful controversies of recent decades, pitting Eastern European intellectuals and their allies in Anglophone historiography against Russian nationalists. The former reinterpret what used to be the liberation from Nazi occupation into a violent (re-)occupation by a Soviet regime intent on genocide.