I entered into reading Exodus and Its Aftermath with great expectations. An in-depth study of the fate of the more than 2 million Jews who sought shelter in the Soviet hinterland after the German attack in June 1941 is a long-awaited addition to Rebecca Manley's groundbreaking 2009 monography To the Tashkent Station—Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War. Albert Kaganovitch adds to it the perspectives of civilians from rural areas and smaller towns who fled from the approaching German troops on their own. However, contrary to the book's title, Kaganovitch does not limit himself to Jewish refugees but also includes many other groups affected by the German invasion: the privileged urban cultural elites from Moscow and Leningrad, already aptly described by Manley, various deported ethnic groups, as well as citizens of Poland and the Baltic states fleeing to the east.
This is certainly understandable—after all, most of the total 16.5 million inner-Soviet war refugees regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliation, faced similarly chaotic conditions. They shared traumatic experiences, hunger, disease, and discrimination, travelled (or walked) the same routes, and witnessed the lack of state support and the corruption and inhumanity of state and party officials. As Manley has shown, for the Soviet government, “human life, however, was not an operative category of the evacuation,” (Manley 2009, 33). Civilians only played a role when they were necessary to the war economy.
Kaganovitch succeeds in his endeavor to shatter the distorted narrative of a successful evacuation campaign created by postwar Soviet historiography and propaganda and to destroy the “myth of the unity of the population and the authorities during the war” (10). Unfortunately, throughout his book, he fails to systematically organize the wealth of information on the heterogenous refugee groups. Much of the presented material is redundant. Kaganovitch jumps from region to region, from one individual account to the next, and from refugees to evacuees to deportees. A related but perhaps more severe shortcoming of the book is his uncritical handling of numbers and sources derived from Soviet authorities, personal memories, and interviews. Kaganovitch also fails to reference existing research on this topic (such as Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Anita Grossmann, eds., Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, 2017).
The book is divided into eight chapters. Chap. 1 describes the chaotic flight of millions to the east and the poorly organized state efforts to cope with this mass migration. In Chap. 2, which deals with different levels of state authorities and their handling of refugees, and in Chap. 5, in which Kaganovitch discusses the tragic fate of orphans, a Jewish perspective is missing entirely. In Chaps. 3 and 4, he deals with the various problems Jewish and non-Jewish refugees faced to survive in the Soviet interior. Chap. 6 deals with xenophobia and positive encounters between refugees and the local population. A telling example of the lacking structure and poor organization is Chap. 7. It begins with describing the widespread trade in stolen identity documents, followed by a discussion of the overlapping use of the categories evacuees, deportees, and refugees. The author then discusses communication strategies among the refugees and the efforts of local authorities to stop their uncontrolled movement and relocate them from crowded cities to rural areas. Each of these topics would deserve a separate chapter, but they are covered here in only six and a half pages (188–95). The remainder of this chapter (195–209) is devoted to highly questionable figures, calculations, and statistics. The last chapter describes the refugees’ difficulties when returning to the territories liberated from German occupation. A short “Conclusion” followed by a “selected Bibliography” and an index conclude the work.
Interestingly, the provided map does not show the Soviet interior from the Chuvash ASSR through the Urals to the Central Asian Republics and Siberia, as covered by Kaganovitch's study. For unknown reasons, only Central Asia has its own subchapter (160–87). In it, the author provides some remarkable conclusions: for example, that the widespread antisemitism encountered by Jewish refugees in the Central Asian republics almost exclusively came from the local Polish and Russian populations. In contrast, the local Muslim populations viewed all refugees simply as Russians (164–65). The presented encounters of the local Persian-speaking (Bukharan) Jews with religious authorities and non-religious Ashkenazi Jews (177–86) expand our knowledge of the interactions between various Jewish groups in the Soviet Union. This subject would have deserved more space and attention. However, again, the interpolated examples from the Baltic States, Belorussia, or Chuvashia distract from the book's actual topic. I can recommend reading Albert Kaganovitch's materially rich and important yet somewhat confused publication only in parallel with Rebecca Manley's well-written and convincingly constructed study.
