6 - “Tashkent Partisans” and “German Bitches”: Relationships with Soviet Power

Summary

During the summer of 1944, the Ukrainian NKVD conducted an investigation of Genia Brand, a returnee from Osh (Kirghiz SSR) accused of spreading ethnic hatred after confronting those she believed had stolen her property during the occupation. On July 13, Brand told her investigators:

Having heard from my neighbor Mazur that the organs of Soviet power were to exile those railroad workers who had lived on occupied territory, I declared that meant there were going to be many free apartments. As for the witness's saying that I said for every dead Jew, thirty Russians would be shot, I said that in this context. I believe it was while I was at the bazaar. I was standing there with Chernysheva—who lives with me—and someone else and someone was talking about how during the occupation “they” had led an old Jew down the street and mocked him. I then said not to worry, as “they” will pay for it. What I meant was the Germans would pay for it, not the Russians.

While Brand spoke of “Russians,” she likely meant “Ukrainians,” for few trumpeted the latter's interests during the civil war to the city's west. There can be little doubt, however, that some returnees desired revenge against the formerly occupied thought to have taken advantage of an empty Kyiv. The Ukrainian capital's relentless population growth created a vicious cycle of rumors and made the local Communists’ efforts to lead more difficult.

At a session of Kyiv's Ukrainian NKVD Military Tribunal on August 3, 1944, Brand's neighbor, Sophiia Mazur, had her testimony to the investigation read out: “In April 1944, Brand told me the whole population who lived through the occupation would be exiled from Kyiv and from Ukraine itself and that the population that had not lived under the occupants would be settled here. With such conversations, Genia terrorized everyone in the building.” Testimony from one of Brand's acquaintances, Anna Rozhdestvenskaia, contained a similar message: “She told me and other inhabitants of our house that soon there would be many free apartments… . After these conversations, the inhabitants of our building began to worry about the possibility of eviction.